In order to solve the problems, such as facial change and uneven gray, caused by the variations of expression and illumination in face recognition, a novel feature extraction method based on Sub-pattern Row-Column Two-Dimensional Linear Discriminant Analysis (Sp-RC2DLDA) was proposed. In the proposed method, by dividing the original images into smaller sub-images, the local features could be extracted effectively, and the impact of variations in facial expression and illumination was reduced. Also, by combining the sub-images at the same position as a subset, the recognition performance could be improved for making full use of the spatial relationship among sub-images. At the same time, two classes of features which complemented each other can be obtained by synthesizing the local sub-features which were achieved by performing 2DLDA (Two-Dimensional Linear Discriminant Analysis) and Extend 2DLDA (E2DLDA) on a set of partitioned sub-patterns in the row and column directions, respectively. Then, the recognition performance was expected to be improved by employing a fusion method to effectively fuse these two classes of complementary features. Finally, nearest neighbor classifier was applied for classification. The experimental results on Yale and ORL face databases show that the proposed Sp-RC2DLDA method reduces the influence of variations in illumination and facial expression effectively, and has better robustness and classification performance than the other related methods.