We present a novel method to estimate the light source direction and relight a face texture image of a single 3D model under arbitrary unknown illumination conditions. We create a virtual irradiance sphere to detect the light source direction from a given illuminated texture image using both normal vector mapping and weighted bilinear interpolation. We then induce a relighting equation with estimated ambient and diffuse coefficients. We provide the result of a series of experiments on light source estimation, relighting and face recognition to show the efficiency and accuracy of the proposed method in restoring the shading and shadows areas of a face texture image. Our approach for face relighting can be used for not only illuminant invariant face recognition applications but also reducing visual load and Improving visual performance in tasks using 3D displays.