Portrait drawing: a simple approach

It is so appealing and rewarding being able to draw a portrait of a friend, a lover, a kid in a way that makes them happy and you proud of it.

But drawing a portrait that captures the resemblance and the "soul" of a subject it is not an easy task and a skill that for many takes year to master and hone.

For this reason I am not going to focus this tutorial on the "capturing the soul" part (at least not for now) and I will instead focus on "getting the proportions right" to at least capture the appearance of your subject (this alone will bring you a long way toward becoming a proficient portrait drawer). In this tutorial I'll examine a method to draw portraits that is suitable for drawing from a picture and from a real person posing for you.

I do not want to overwhelm you with details and I'd rather prefer moving rapidly to the drawing, making comments and observations along the way.

I have chosen the beautiful Michael Pfeiffer as a subject for this portrait drawing and I will be using almost all the way a 2H pencil, just to keep things simple.

Lets' get started!

Ok she is quite beautiful, isn't she? Ok try not to get overwhelmed by the challenge and do everything one step at a time. There are many details on this face, let's try to break those detail and forms down to the essential things.

The first and I repeat the first thing I want you to do is to visualize the face as a big oval and establish three fundamental lines: The eye line first, the mouth line second and the nose line as the third one.

This is very important and it is also important that you trace (mentally) these lines in the order I have suggested. The reason is because your eyes might deceive you and drive you to get wrong proportions if you do not follow this rule.

Establishing the mouth before the nose helps imposing a downward limit to the extension of the facial features. But do not get distracted and keep going.

So you have established these lines? Good! Now draw.

Quickly and roughly sketch the shape of the head and the neck and shoulders. That's it, do not do anything else. Now wait a few seconds and look, seriously examine intensely how these few and simple elements look together

Is everything in scale properly? Move on only if you are absolutely happy with what you have achieved so far! Ok let's move on with portrait drawing.

Now is the time to add those very lines I ask you to visualize upon the oval of the face. It's imperative you position these lines as good as you can now...

Take your time. Do it with calm and patience... I will be here waiting :)

Done? Are you happy with those lines and their positioning? Great, these three lines are really all that you need to efficiently build your drawing upon.

Trace roughly the mouth, the eyes and the wideness of the nose. Now look back at your subject. You should already see an hint of resemblance if you did it right so far. Ok next step!

As you can see I have added very very roughly the hairs, eyebrows and shaped the nose a little bit. I drew a ear also. All these things to start balancing out the drawing. This means that it will make it easier from now on to look at the subject and work to achieve resemblance if the main face features are in place.

I know it doesn't look like her yet but bare with me. You have got the foundations right and that's the main thing. You have got distance from mouth to chin tip, distance between the eyes and so forth, al those things that will make your portrait drawing resemble the subject you re drawing.

From now on what you need to do, really is look at the subject constantly to get the shape of the single facial features and start working adding detail but never focusing too much on a single feature.

Add a few lines around the eyes then move to the shape of the face, then to the nose and the mouth then back to the eyes. Do not spend more than few seconds on each part.

Remember you want to get the resemblance right. Too much detail now and you are on a "no through road".

See, all the drawing is proceeding as a whole. There are not parts which are developed more than others. And this is good. The drawing is still very fluid and you can make changes if you want. Like I am going to do.