Character Drawing vs. Portrait Painting: The Differences That Shape Your Style

1. Welcome: Ever wanted to draw or paint a face but felt unsure which direction to go with your style. Characters, portraits, cartoons, realism. They're all fun, but which direction should you go? I'm Gabrielle Brickey, and here's what I've learned over years of creating in both a character style and a portrait style. You don't need to pick lane, but it does help to understand the different approaches because those early decisions will shape the end result. Your brush choices, your reference choices, and even your mindset can naturally pull your work one way or another. Once you realize the differences, you can make more intentional choices and guide your art in the way you want to go. In this class, we'll explore the key differences I've noticed between my character art and portrait art styles. My hope is that it will help you see your own art and your style preferences more clearly, too. Then I'll share a process that'll help you discover what inspires you and how you can develop or refine your own unique style moving forward. Then I'll show you the first 10 minutes of how I personally begin both a character drawing and a portrait painting. My hope is that this class gives you clarity about what you like in art and the confidence to shape your style or styles moving forward. Join me in the next video, and let's get started. 2. The Differences I've Noticed: Let me take you back to when I first started drawing faces as a young teenager. For years, I was completely obsessed with drawing realistic pencil portraits. My goal was to always draw as photo realistically as possible. So the more it looked like a photo, the better. I never quite hit full hyper realism, but as a team, that was always a dream. As I got a little older, I started exploring more types of art, and I found myself drawn to something a little bit different. It wasn't exactly cartoons, but more of a stylized character look. I was inspired by all these amazing artists online that I looked up to, and they all had their own unique style, and I really wanted to find mine. That's when I began experimenting with character art, and it opened up a whole new creative path for me. Around that same time, I was experimenting with tons of mediums, charcoal, and then I went into pastels and then I started exploring oil paint, eventually I started painting digitally and procreate. That's where my current portrait style really started to take shape. These days, I'm no longer aiming for extreme realism, like I was with my pencil portraits. My portraits lean more toward a painterly sort of realism, I think. So these days, I bounce between two main styles, my stylized character art and my more realistic painterly portraits. I love both approaches, so I go back and forth depending on what inspires me that day. So with all that in mind, I can only speak from my own experience. So today, I'd love to share some of the key differences I've noticed between these two styles I work in. So between the character art style and realistic portrait painting style. Since I don't usually create super cartoony characters or hyper realistic portraits, I won't be showing those extreme ends of the scale. Instead, I'll walk you through what I've learned by moving between my character art and portrait art. They're different enough that I think you'll be able to clearly see what sets them apart, even though they both revolve around the same subject, which is the face. My hope is that by sharing how I move between these two styles, you'll start to notice your own preferences and feel a little more confident about the direction you want to take with your art. And since I primarily work in Procreate, I'll be showing you the differences through that lens. So with all that in mind, let's walk through the core differences I've noticed between stylized character art and more realistic portraits. Okay, so first up, brush differences. When I go to make a character sketch, I'm grabbing a procreate brush that feels like a real life drawing material. And when I'm doing a portrait painting, I'm reaching for a procreate brush that feels more like working with paint. And FYI, I'll be sharing these exact brushes with you for free, but I have two main brush sets, and I would consider these ones my hero brushes. If I'm going to make a character sketch, I'm grabbing my willow charcoal streamlined brush. This brush is smooth and rhythmic, but it has a little bit of grit to keep my drawings from looking overly digital. It feels like working with a pencil in a traditional medium. But when I created this custom brush, I made it with the smoothness of soft willow charcoal in mind. I love this brush and it's essential for me when I go to make my character sketches. Occasionally when I'm making my portrait paintings, I might grab that same brush, but more often than not, I'm grabbing this 60 pencil. This is a modified Procreate default brush that I made some adjustments to, and I'm obsessed with this brush. I love it for its painterly quality. And instead of it feeling like a drawing pencil, this one actually feels more like a paintbrush to me when you place it on its side. This brush is essential for me and helps me get big shapes of value up on my canvas when I'm beginning a portrait painting. So right off the bat, even the brush sets I'm reaching for begins to set the tone for where I'm headed. Alright, the next big difference I've noticed between character art and portrait art is reference differences. So the image that I'm looking at while I'm making my piece. If I'm creating a character drawing, the first thing I'm going to do is go through my reference database of photos I've taken of ball jointed dolls. And I know that sounds a little strange, but ball jointed dolls work wonderfully for references because they already have those stylized features. So for me, they're perfect references for drawing characters. By contrast, when it comes to painting portraits, I love using beautiful references of real humans, especially photos with strong inspiring lighting. Some great places to find reference photos for portraits are unsplash.com, pixabay.com, and shutterstock.com. Another big difference I've noticed between my character art and portrait art is in the process, and in the mindset I bring into each process. When I'm creating a character sketch, I go in with a drawing mentality. With characters, I always start with a loose sketch. I'm thinking in terms of line and capturing flowing rhythms. It's very much a drawing mindset. But when I create a portrait, I'm thinking more like a painter. With portraits, I start by blocking in big shapes of value with thick strokes, and I'm thinking in terms of light and shadow, not lines. It's more of a painting mindset. So for character art, my process leans more into drawing, and for portrait art, my process leans more into painting. Here's another example of where you can see it in action. So my character art process leans into drawing with linework, while my portraits typically lean into massing in with big shapes of value. Again, now, I want to be clear that this is just my perspective, and another artist may lean more into painting for characters or may lean more into drawing for portraits and still make fantastic and beautiful art. That's the beauty of art, right? It's about exploring, experimenting, and finding what feels right for you. Okay, the next difference I want to highlight is a proportional difference. My characters often have exaggerated proportions. So I typically make the eyes bigger. I shrink the nose a little bit. I make the mouth bigger, and I make the neck a bit thinner, that sort of thing. For portraits, I lean into a more true to life spacing and shaping of things. I look for landmarks, accurate distances, and believable human proportions. The next key difference I want to talk about is in my design focus. My character art tends to stay more two D with a focus on shape design. And with my portrait art, my main goal becomes rendering three D forms. So while both approaches work with shape, you can see how in the image on the left of the character, the shapes appear flat. Like, you can see the shape of the circle behind her, the simple shape of her earrings, and then the shading under her nose and under her neck. It's very simple. It's all very simple. So with character drawing, when I bring it to a fully finished piece, I'm designing with shapes. For portrait painting for me, though, it's more about observing forms. So the soft turn of a cheek, the little forms on a nose. So no longer am I just thinking about the flat shape of things. I'm trying to make them more three dimensional, so I'm considering forms. So spheres, cubes, cylinders, cones, that sort of thing. Let's look at another example here. So here you can see, I captured the little ovals of her glasses, and I kept it super simple. Her hair is designed with super simple shapes. He collars just a super simple shape. There's not a ton of detail or complexity here. Whereas with this example, I'm appreciating that soft roundness that happens on her forehead and the form that you can see there. I'm appreciating all the tiny little form changes that happen on her nose and around her cheeks. It's just a different appreciation for different elements of design in both of these styles of art. And then the final difference I want to highlight is rendering differences. So this is similar to what we just talked about, but let's take it a step further. So, not always, but typically for me, this looks like flat two D rendering for characters and three D detailed rendering for more realistic portraits. So let me explain what I mean. See how this little section of this character's cheek is pretty much represented as one flat color. Sure you see that paper texture I put on top, but it's one color to represent her whole cheek area there. Whereas on my portrait painting, you can see a whole variety of colors and value shifts happening. This cheek is not flatly rendered on this portrait. I'm showing the forms of the cheek area by giving you more information and details. So in characters, I'm simplifying the rendering. Whereas on my portraits, I'm making it more detailed and giving you more information. Another rendering difference I notice between my pieces is in the edgework. My character art edges tend to be harder with less variety, and my portrait art edges can be hard, firm, soft, lost. There's just a ton more variety there. So let's zoom into this part of the head so we can see what I mean a bit better. Here on the character, you can see how the line work works to create a hard edge quality. Sure, there's a little teeny bit of variation up there at the top, but it's mostly all just a hard edge, clearly separating her head from the background. Now, looking over at the portrait painting, I mean, look at all the variety here. There's this textury soft edge up here. Here we have a harder edge, and here we have kind of a jagged edge, so kind of softer. There's just a ton more variety in my portrait art edge quality. Again, let me reiterate, though, neither approach is better than the other. The best way to draw or paint is the way that feels good to you, where you enjoy the process and love the results. For me, that just so happens to be both character art and portrait art. I enjoy creating both styles, so I keep doing both. But ultimately, it's up to you to explore and decide what you love to do as an artist. So let's talk more about how you can discover exactly what you love. It might be helpful for you to think about style for drawing faces as a sliding scale. You don't have to pick one of these and stay there forever. You can live anywhere along this scale and jump around. You're the artist. That's up to you. So for me, I land at stylized character, and I'd say somewhere around realism for my portraits. Also, this is just a scale I've put together so you can use your own words to describe these things. But you can totally bounce around between things. Obviously, I do it myself. So this is my character art style that I've been describing. I consider these to be stylized characters. And here's my portrait art that I've been describing. I would probably consider it realism, but it's also painterly. Then I also have something like this where I've leaned more into a character style proportionally, but I played with rendering out the lighting to make things look more three D. That brings it into a more semi realism, maybe. I'm not really sure. But that's what's fun about this. We get to play, we get to experiment and be artists. 3. Style Exercise: You're feeling a little confused or overwhelmed by all of this. Don't worry. I've got an exercise to help. It'll help you discover what you're naturally drawn to, what inspires you, and how you can start developing your own unique style moving forward. So this is a four step process, and it is to find art you admire, analyze and investigate that art, make a master copy, and then reflect on your experience. All right, so let's break it down step by step. Step one, Fine Art you admire. Through Instagram, through Pentrist. If you have a museum in your area, look there, look at art books, you know where to find stuff that inspires you. But you want to find art that makes you think, Wow, I wish I'd created this. It would be a dream to draw or paint like this. I'd say find about three pieces that make you feel this way. Now, step number two, it's time to analyze each of those pieces and kind of investigate a little. Ask yourself, what specifically do I love about this piece? Is it the colors? Is it the way the artist design shapes? Is it the proportions they used for the face? Try to really be specific here and write down three to five things you love per piece. You can even ask yourself, Where do I think this falls on that scale we talked about earlier? Is it a cartoon? Is it a stylized character? Is it semi realism? Would you call it realism or maybe hyperrealism? Just do your best to kind of categorize it a little bit. All of this helps you move from admiration into understanding. Putting actual words to how you feel about the piece is an excellent step toward understanding what you're looking at and what you love about it. So instead of just saying, I love this piece because it's beautiful, try to be more specific. Say something like, I love this piece because of how the artists layer those pink and purple hues. The way they sit right on top of each other, it's kind of like they're singing. Like, you want to be that specific with it. So, the more specific you get, the more you can start understanding just why exactly you love a piece. After you do that, it's time to pick one of those pieces, maybe the one you love the most and make a master copy of it. I truly believe making a master copy is one of the best things you can do to improve your skills as an artist. I feel like I've made the biggest jumps in my skill level after making master copies. If you're wondering how to make a master copy, it's simply the act of copying a piece of art that you consider to be a masterpiece. Keywords you consider to be a masterpiece. It's about studying a piece of art that is like goals for you and trying to replicate it as closely as possible. You'll be amazed at how much you learn just by copying from brushwork to color choices to composition, it's one of the best ways you can learn. There's just one important thing to note. If the artist is still living, it's best practice to keep your copy private. Like, don't post it online. And if the artist has passed away, sharing is generally more acceptable, but you'll want to look up specific copyright rules and always give proper credit. The final step is to take a moment to reflect after making your master copy. Ask yourself, what did I learn from this experience? What techniques or choices would I like to bring into my own work moving forward? And if you made more than one master copy, ask yourself, which process felt more enjoyable or natural to me. Okay? So reflect on the experience of creating your master copy. So find art you admire, figure out what you love about it, make a master copy, and reflect on what you learned. This is a great exercise, but it's just one of many. You compare this kind of study with all the other ways you're learning. So sketching from life, practicing from photos, and drawing from your imagination. This process is just one more way to practice. It'll help you sharpen your skills and shape your unique style moving forward. Okay, so we have covered a lot today, and I know that this is a lot to take in. So now I want to slow things down and zoom in on just one key difference between character art and portrait art, and that is the process. And specifically, how I start each piece. The beginning of the piece is so important. It kind of sets the tone for everything that follows. So now I'm going to give you a peek into both workflows by showing you how I approach the first 10 minutes of each. So one character sketch and one portrait painting. So let's hop in Procreate and I'll walk you through it. 4. Class Project: Rather than overwhelm you with creating a finished piece for your class project, instead, just share your start. Use this as a moment to try out the processes I'm about to share or share your unique methods of starting. Here's a simple plan forward if you'd like to create a class project. First, pick a reference. I've added a small collection of portrait and character images for you inside the Projects and Resources tab. Choose one that inspires you or find your own. Next, start your piece. Work along with me as I show you how you can approach a character drawing or portrait painting. And as you work, notice what feels fun, natural, and easy to you. And also notice what feels difficult or less enjoyable. Those little observations are important because it'll tell you what style you actually enjoy and may want to pursue further. Take a screenshot of your work at the ten, the 15 minute mark and upload it to the projects and resources section of class here on Skillshare. The real goal of your class project is simple. Get your hand moving and pay attention to what interests you. Watching a class is helpful, but combining learning with practice is where the real growth happens. This project isn't about finishing a masterpiece. It's about discovering what feels fun to you. The more you experiment, the clearer your artistic preferences will become. So let's begin with character drawing. 5. Character Drawing Start: So here's how I start almost every character drawing I make. And FYI, I'm working on a 5,000 by 3,500 pixel Canvas at 300 DPI. So I start by pressing the wrench, which is actions, ad, and then I insert this photo right here. I think I'm going to reference this one right here. So I'm just going to grab the transform arrow to size it up. And I make sure uniform is on so that nothing stretches weirdly. Now I'm just cropping off the edges of the image, and you can do it like this. I'm taking it off the edge of the canvas and pressing the transform arrow, and that will just delete anything I don't need. All right. Now I'm just going to pull that reference over here. I'm going to add a new layer so I can start sketching. Alright, so like we talked about, pretty essential for me is using that willow charcoal streamline brush from my character brush set. So I'm going to grab that. And I'm going to wind up thinking about the circular shape of her head, and when I'm ready, I'm going to touch down and draw a few wrapping lines. And now the center line of the face. Then I'll attach the neck on and hint at the shoulders. Put that ear on there. Just a simple shape. So now I'm just thinking about the general shape of those eye sockets and putting them in as little place markers for now. And I like to simplify the bottom of the nose into a simple squashed upside down triangle. And then the lips can be a simple shape to start with, too. I like to keep things super simple when I'm first starting my characters, and I avoid adding any details in the beginning. This helps keep things from becoming overly precious because we've dedicated a lot of time on them. Like, if I went and started detailing the eye, and then it was just all wrong, I would be annoyed because I spent so much time on it. So I like to keep things very loose as I plan my sketch. Okay, let me grab this eraser tool because I want to move this nose up a little bit. I'm just messily hinting at the irises now and lashes and the brows. Let me put a little marker for the jugular notch and the clavicles, the neck, maybe she'll have, like, a frilly sort of sleeve. I'm not really sure yet. And then maybe her hair will come down sort of straight like this. I'm not really sure if I like that. Just playing around. Everything's still able to be changed. When I'm working from the doll references, they're typically a loose guide. So I'm using my imagination a bit for this too. Sometimes when you sketch, it helps to flip your canvas horizontally, just to give you a fresh eye. Maybe her hair comes down straight like this. Just go to reposition that a little bit so I have some more room. This first pass on a sketch is like my permission to play and experiment with different ideas. She could turn into any type of character, you know? She doesn't have to be locked into one character just because that's what I drew. You can always change things, especially in this very beginning phase. So when this first pass on a character, I play around a lot with hairstyle, the neckline, and kind of the way that's designed, and, you know, which accessories I add and that sort of thing. And actually, with both my portraits and characters, they tend to just be bus, so I cut them off past the shoulders. Like, it's pretty much just shoulders and is what I like to paint and draw. I'm going to darken these lips. That's another thing that you can play around with at this stage is kind of the subtle emotion you can add to your characters. The emotion can really tell the story of your character, and I found that especially the eyebrows and the corners of the mouth makes all the difference. And the most subtle shifts in direction with those two things can completely change the emotion. Maybe I'll try some hearts back here, that's not quite working with the attitude she has, so maybe not. Maybe I'll give her a necklace. I think I like that direction a little better. And I think this short hairs kind of cool. Maybe she has bangs. Nah. We a try, though. So yeah, it's all about experimenting and playing with ideas at this stage. And I'm just loosely using the reference at this point. So this feels good to me for a first pass on this sketch. Once I have a basic sketch where the general idea is mapped out, I lower the opacity and then add a second layer to work on another pass. I don't have time to show you the whole process, but on the second pass, I nail down the design better and I add a bit more detail. Then I repeat the process again on a third pass finalizing the drawing. So as you can see, with my character art starts, I lean into that drawing mindset, working primarily with lines to get my character up on the canvas. 6. Portrait Painting Start: Now I want to show you how I usually go about starting my more realistic portrait paintings. So you can see I already have a reference placed on a 5,000 by 3,500 pixel Canvas at 300 DPI. And the first thing I'm going to do actually is duplicate my reference. Now, here I'm going to press snapping and make sure magnetics and snapping are turned on. Now I'm just going to drag that duplicated reference over. What we're going to do now is color in the second duplicate with one color. That's going to make it so that my reference and my would be painting are perfectly side by side and are the exact same size. This I find makes finding proportional accuracy so much easier because we'll be comparing things one to one. So there's no weird sizing up or sizing down. I like to make my life easier, not harder, so I really like this one to one approach. So to fill it in perfectly, first, we're going to need to alpha lock the layer. So just tap the second layer and press Alphao. This will make it so that you can only paint on the pixels that are already there. So basically, we're only going to be able to paint on this rectangle. And you'll be able to tell it's alpha locked because you'll see this checkered background here. So now going to my brushes, I'm going to grab a big soft brush so I can quickly and easily color it in. And I like to pick up a mid tone for my background color, so nothing too light and nothing too dark. And because I alpha lock the layer, I'm only going to be able to paint within that rectangle. And like I said, for me, I love working one to one like this because it makes finding proportional accuracy a breeze down the road. Okay, so as I mentioned, for my portraits, I tend to lean into a painterly approach. I go in thinking about making big paint strokes versus working with lines. So I grab a brush that will help me do that. So I tend to reach for this six B pencil. Before we begin painting, though, I have one more thing I want to do that helps me a lot. So back in my layers, I'm just going to duplicate the reference photo again. Then on that duplicated reference image, I go to adjustments, Gaussian blur. Then from here, I just use my finger to drag that to the right a little. This is going to bring the blurriness up a little bit. What I'm doing here is I'm eliminating details. I find that details can be intimidating but also distracting at the beginning of a piece like this. So I work to remove the distractions from the start, and blurring helps me see the more important thing in the painting, which is the big shapes of value. So the big shapes of light and dark that make up this composition. If I don't get the big shapes right, the details have nothing solid to sit on. So I have to get the big value patterns right first, then add details on top of that on top of a solid foundation. Take a look at this. I'll triple press this so you can see it in gray scale. When I'm creating a portrait painting, the beginning focuses around capturing the lighting or these big shapes of value. And you can imagine them even as simple blobs. So not hair, not a face, not a shirt. So this weird dark blob here, this lighter group of blobs here. This weird dark blob here. This big triangular looking shape of light here. This beginning part of the portrait painting process for me is about eliminating intimidation so that I can start and get going on a piece. And the blurring really helps with that. All right, let me turn it back to color here and we'll get started. So, like I said, I'm going for that six B pencil because angled more so on its side, it reminds me of working with, like, a paint brush and painting with a thick stroke. Alright, so I'm going to grab this color on the skin and the light. But actually, I'm on the wrong layer, so this is a good thing to know. Always make sure you're on your painting layer. So let me go back. Now I'm going to pick up this color in the skin on the light, and I like to pick up an average color for an area, and I'm just going to start putting in those blobs of color. I'm leaving intimidation at the door. We're just painting big shapes of value. Then I'm just going to block in this big dark shape here. And I know that I said for my characters, when it comes to the design, I focus on shapes more. However, in the beginning of my portrait painting process, I definitely lean into working with shapes as well. Working with abstract shapes of value just to get something up on the canvas. Then once I have something up on the canvas that I can start pushing around a little, then I start focusing more on those forms we talked about. On the whole, though, when I consider the entire process and not just this isolated first 10 minutes, I do consider character art to be more shape focused and portrait art to be more form focused. So yeah, just getting up big shapes of value. I'm not overly concerned about being completely precise. I can always check myself later and push things around into a more accurate place. Right now, my goal is to just get something up on the canvas. You can see, though, how different this is from the character start, though. I'm not working with lines. I'm not making an accurate or detailed line drawing. Instead, I'm working with big shapes, massing in big color patches. For me in this beginning part of a portrait, just like I've mentioned, I'm just thinking about big abstract shapes of value. So I'm looking at both positive and negative space to get everything up on the canvas. So here I'm looking at the positive space of her shirt, but at the same time, I'm also comparing it to the negative space, that little brown sliver that we can see of the background. I'm always going back and forth between both positive and negative spaces. And the blurring makes this so much easier to see, too. Now I'm just getting some of these value shifts in the background. So I'm just placing a very general marker for the eye sockets here. But do you see how this approach leans into painting more? I'm really not focused on outlines or line work at all. It's all about big paint strokes. All focused around capturing lighting and building up a solid foundation to build forms upon. There's a little bit of a hot or orange color there that I want to get in. And when I paint like this, I just get into the flow. I know some artists really don't like when people use the color picker. For me, I just don't mind. I just consider it another tool in my digital toolbox. I encourage you to do what feels best for you as an artist, but I do think it is important to understand and study color. I just use this as a little digital art shortcut. But when I pick up colors, I'm trying to pick up the average color of an area. So nothing too light and nothing too dark, but the average color to describe an area. As you can see, this painting looks not great. But as long as you continue to push through and trust the process, it will work through the weird looking phase and into a beautiful portrait painting. Now, I'm just going to put in a couple little markers for the features, and they're just simple brushstrokes. I'll be wrapping up this demo shortly, but this is the general approach I continue on with in my portrait painting process. After blocking in with big shapes of value, I gradually move into medium and then smaller shapes, all while staying focused on developing the forms through light and shadow. So same artist, same app, same general subject, a face. But just by changing the starting approach, you open the door to completely different outcomes. 7. Next Steps: I hope seeing these two starts gives you a little more insight into your own creative process, and maybe even inspires you to try both of these approaches and see what feels best to you or explore cartoon, semi realism, hyper realism, whatever it is that you're drawn to. Let's quickly recap what we covered today. We talked about the differences between stylized character art and more realistic portrait art and the specific areas where I've noticed the differences in my own work, like brush choices, reference choices, proportions, the process design and rendering. We also talked about how there's no single right way to draw a face. Style exists on a scale, and you can shift along that scale wherever you want. After that, we explored some of the ways you can start discovering your own style. We talked about the process of finding art, you admire, analyzing it, making master copies, and reflecting on what you've learned. And then I shared a peek into my own process showing you how I start a character sketch and a portrait painting with a look at the first 10 minutes of each. Support you as you're exploring and experimenting, I'd love to give you two of my very favorite Procreate brush sets for free. One is designed for character art, and the other is for portrait painting, the exact ones I've shown in today's session. So the character brush set is a small section made for stylized drawing. It includes my go to sketching brush and a few fun extras to help bring your characters to life. And then my portrait set features pantlly brushes designed to build form, blend smoothly, and add texture and depth to your portrait work. And you can access both of those sets right here in the projects and resources section of class. Once you're in, you'll also get bonus resources to support whichever creative path you'd like to take from here. Try the character brushes, try the portrait brushes, try both, explore experiment and see what works best for you. Thank you so much for spending this time with me. I hope this session gives you a little more confidence and maybe the permission to explore what you love to create. I'm so happy our pads crossed today. Thank you so much again for watching. And until next time, happy painting.