How to Draw Portraits with Confidence

1. Intro: Portraits can be one of the most challenging and fun subjects to draw. But understanding how to draw the face is an essential skill for creatives, whether you are a painter, an illustrator, or designer. Hi, I'm Erica, and I'm a visual artist and photographer. In this class, you'll be drawing a portrait using a photo for reference. I'll start by showing you how to choose a reference photo to set yourself up for a success. Then I'll be teaching you some tips for drawing the face and understanding the proportion and placement of the features. Next, I'll walk you through my process for drawing a portrait from start to finish, including adding highlights and shadows and then refining your work. A lot of my work focuses on portraits. I took an anatomy of drawing class in college, and I was hooked. Once you have a better understanding of how to draw the face, your drawings can easily be adapted to a variety of media such as painting, illustration, or digital artwork. By the end of this class, you'll have all the skills you need to begin drawing portraits on your own that you can return to again and again so that you can keep practicing and improving your skills. Whether you're drawing for fun or looking to level up your creative professional skills, this class will help you draw faces more confidently. When you're ready, let's draw. 2. The Project: For your class project, you'll be drawing a portrait from a reference photo, and posting your finished work in the project gallery. I'll be showing you my tips for drawing faces, as well as my process from drawing a portrait from start to finish. The topics we'll be discussing in this class are; how to choose a reference photo, five tips for drawing faces, how to draw the structure of the head, blocking in the features in hair, checking our work, and finally, adding highlights, shadows, and refining our finished portrait. The materials are simple enough that you probably already have them at home, so you don't need to go out and buy anything special. All you need is a pencil, some paper and eraser, and a reference photo of someone that you'd like to draw. But that's really all you need for this class. Drawn portraits shouldn't be intimidating, so I really want you to relax and have fun and enjoy the process of either learning how to draw faces if this is your first time, or learning how to improve drawing faces. But if you wanted to take this a step further and add color or a collage, or you just wanted to level up your work a little bit, I'd really love to see what you come up with. 3. Choosing a Photo: I'm going to walk you through all of the things that I look for when I'm choosing a photo. So that by the end of this lesson you'll be able to choose images on your own. We need to find a reference photo for our drawing. We're just going to do a quick search on the Internet. I like to go to Pinterest to find most of my images. You can see that there's a lot of different images to choose from. But I'm going to show you what I usually look for when I'm choosing photos. I'm going to go to my Pinterest account and show you some of the images that I've created. A lot of these photos you can see, the subject is facing the camera. That's going to be really important when you're just starting to draw the face and your learning where all of the features go and proportion of the features. It doesn't matter if the photo is black and white or color, because we're not worrying about color in this project. We're only going to be dealing with how to draw the face. Again, what we're looking for is a photo that has a plain background. We want a subject that is facing the camera. We want a clear photo. We don't want anything that's fuzzy. We want to make sure that the subject is completely in the frame. So again, this subject is tilted just slightly, but she's facing the frame enough that we can still see all of her features. She's not a profile or 3/4, and she is completely in the photo frame. This would be a really ideal image. You can see the front of her face, all of her features are very clear. The background is very minimal. I'm not worried about the color. Whether or not the image is in black and white or color is really immaterial because we're going to be focusing on the features, the hair, and the overall proportions of the photo that we're looking at. Also, her hand is in the image, but it's not covering up the face or the features in any way. A photo like this would also be really ideal. She's got this beautiful hair that's framing her face. I can clearly see her features and her face, and also again, the background is not distracting. You can also see her neck and the shoulders, and then you've got her shirt, which is also creating this beautiful framing area as well. This would be a good image if you wanted to challenge yourself a little bit. There is some texture in the background. It's black and white. So again, you'd have that strong contrast when you get to shading and adding highlights and shadows. But there's a little bit of texture and you can see there's some rain, looks like she's looking out through a window. So it would be a little bit more challenging if you wanted to deal with the background. This is really interesting, but there is a lot of the face is in shadow. The lips are covered up by the flowers. And we can't really see the other side of the face, it's in profile. If you were more of an advanced artist, I would say go ahead and try this out as a challenge. I'm going to choose this image. The reason I like this image is because I can see some of her hair, the background is minimal, so the background doesn't distract from the photo. I can see all of her features very clearly. Her hair has a very interesting shape. The other reason I like this is because, while it is in black and white, I'm going to be thinking more about the contrast. When we get to the highlight and shadows, I'm going to be able to see the shadowed part and the highlight parts much more clearly. If you have an image like this that you really like where the lighting is very even, what you could do is you could convert it to black and white, and you could change the contrast so that you can clearly see the highlights and shadows. This is the image that I'll be using. It will be in the resource section of the class, as well as that link to the Pinterest photo and some other images for you as well. Go ahead and choose your reference photo, and then I will see you in the next lesson. 4. 5 Tips for Faces: Besides having a good reference photo, there's a few tips you need to know to help you get started. It's really important to understand the proportion and placement of the features. The better you become at drawing faces, the more confident that you'll feel in developing your own style. There's five basic tips for drawing the head. The first is we break down the structure of the head, and start by simplifying it into a circle, and then the jaw shape. Then you break it into three sections. The hairline, the eyebrows, and the nose. You can check that just by measuring 1, 2, 3 with your fingers. The eyes are just slightly below the eyebrows, and then the lips are about halfway between the bottom of the nose and the bottom of the chin. Next, you're going to use the nose, which is at the bottom of this bottom third line. The nose would be right about here, and then change my color. The corners of the nose line up with the corners of the eyes. The eyes should be about one eye space apart, so if you measure the width of an eye, one eye should fit in-between your eyes. If you measure your nose, your nose should also be the width of an eye. It's an easy way to check your work. The center of your eye should come down and line up with the corners of the mouth, and then you can just use your pencil to measure all of your features. Just by taking my pencil, I'm going to slide it over to the edge of the nose, slide my thumb over to the end of the other side of the nose, and then use that to measure the eye. Slide it over, it's the same width, flat it over again, it's the same width. Then if I bring this line down this guide, it should be about the same. Now that we understand the proportions of the face, it's time to take what we've learned and start drawing the structure of the head. Join me in the next lesson. 5. Drawing the Head: At this stage, we're just going to block in the general shape of our subject. I'm not worried about anything being perfect at this point. I don't want to draw any details like the hair or the features. I just want to simplify everything and break it down into shapes. We want to have our reference photo right next to our papers so we can see what we're working with. Then the first thing we're going to do is map out the shape of the head and the jaw. What I do is I draw a circle for the top of the head and then I draw the shape of the jawline. That gives me a more accurate shape of the jaw and the chin lines. I'm just blocking out the general structure and making sure it fits on the page, and nothing gets cropped. Then using my pencil to compare the general angle of the shoulders, and the neck, and making sure that they line up generally, with all the rest of the features and the head. I just want to keep it simple and draw light at this stage because I know I'm going to go back and fix any mistakes later on and make adjustments. Then I'm going to divide the face into three sections. The top third is going to be the eyebrows, the middle is going to be the nose, and the bottom third is going to be the mouth. You can use your pencil and compare to make sure that the eyes and the nose and the mouth line up with the measurements that you've created on your basic structure. We want to make sure that we're drawing very lightly so that we can erase later. Because again, this is just the first initial sketch and we're going to go in and we're going to make modifications and refinements later on. In the next lesson, we're going to start blocking in the features and the shape of the hair. When you're ready, I'll see you there. 6. Drawing the Features: It's time to start blocking in the features. In this lesson, we're going to talk about how to draw the features, and how to break them down into simple shapes. We're also going to talk about where to start drawing the features on the face, so that you can easily go back and check your work later. We're also going to start talking about how to start drawing the hair on our figure, so that by the end of this lesson, we'll have the basic structure of our overall portrait. Now that we have some general guides, and the structure of the head, we can start drawing the facial features. I always start with the nose, which is in the center of the face, and then I break it down into three shapes. The bottom of the nose should be touching that two-thirds line. This is going to help anchor the features in place, and from there I can use it as a reference to start drawing the eyes and the rest of the features. I'm keeping the eyes pretty simple at this stage, starting with circles and using the edge of the nostrils for a reference point. It's important to note that when you're drawing eyelids, you want to make sure the upper and lower lids overlap the eyes, and this will help make them look like they're actually sitting in the head and not just sitting on the face or more cartoon like. For this lesson, we're still drawing lightly and just focusing on where the features go on the head, and making sure the basic proportions are right before we start adding any detail. The mouth can be simplified into four ovals. The top lip curves up, so I'm drawing two ovals tilting upward. The space between the ovals will be the cupid's bow, which is that little curve underneath the nose, and at the top of your lips. The shape of the cupid's bow actually follows the shape of the bottom of your nose. The bottom of the lip sticks out from the face more, and tends to be a little bit larger. So the ovals for the bottom of the lip will point down more towards the chin. This is what's going to help make the mouth look more plump and curved, and a little bit more realistic. It's really important to note that depending on your reference photo or the gender of your portrait, the lips could be thinner or thicker, and every individual is different. So really pay attention to the reference photo that you're looking at, and the shapes of the features that you're drawing. The nostrils are the darkest part of the face, and they kind of look like parentheses. The key to join them is not to connect them to the corners or the tip of the nose. Next I'm going to start blocking in the shape and position of the hair, remembering the hair actually sits above the head, and the hairline comes down a little bit below the top of that circle that we drew for the head. I'm just outlining the general shape of the hair, and the areas where the hair falls over or around the face. I'm looking for the direction of how the hair is falling, and not drawing individual hairs which will help make it look more natural. Depending on your reference photo and the type of hair that you're drawing, this is going to be different also. Her hair is piled on top of her head with a lot of strands following down. I want to make sure I draw the massive hair on top, and then the shape and curve of the strands that fall down over her face. This is just a basic guide for where the features are going to be, making sure that they're in proportion. You can use the worksheet provided in the resource section of this class. You can also refer back to those five tips on drawing faces, for more guidance. You can see I have some corrections to make in my drawing, but overall, I'm pretty happy with how this turned out so far. Remember we're going to check our work in the next lesson, so we can make any corrections or adjustments there. Take your time, keep going, you've got this. I'll see you next when we check our work. 7. Check Your Work: Now it's time to check our work. We're going to be using our reference photo and our pencil to be doing something called comparative measuring. We'll be comparing the angles of the face and checking to make sure the features are where they're supposed to be. I'm using my pencil to measure the features. I'm just lining it up with one side of the nose and then sliding my thumb over until it touches the other side. Then I'm going to use that to compare the width of the eyes that I sketched out in the last lesson and make a mark where the outer edge of the eye should be. Then I'll draw a guide up from the corner of the nose to mark where the tear ducts are. This is a simple way to measure and check what your drawing to make sure that everything aligns and matches up. I'm looking at the angles and direction of her nose and nostrils and I'm defining it a bit more and darkening the lines just a bit. I'm really paying attention to the shape of the nostrils and even a slight difference in the nose can completely change the look of a drawing and make someone completely unrecognizable. I'm simplifying the nose using as few lines as possible. We tend to outline the nose when really it's just a collection of shadows. The curve of the upper eyelid roughly follows the shape of the eye in two angled lines, tilting up at the highest point and then curving away and down and the pupils should be partially covered. The bottom of the eyelid can be broken down into about three lines curving down and then up and out towards the outer corners of the eye. Then using my pencil, I'm comparing the angle of the eyebrows, which start at the inner corners of the eyes and slant up. I'm just blocking them in as straight lines at this point to show where they curve above the eyes. The inner arch tends to be a bit higher and the brows tend to sit a bit lower on male faces. But again, everyone is different. It's really important to compare your reference photo and to make observations. I noticed that the eyes aren't quite the same, so I'm going back to compare the angle of the eye to what I drew and making a couple of corrections. The fold above the eyes should follow the same direction and shape of the eye itself. Again, depending on your photo and the person that you're drawing, the eyelids can differ in thickness and shape of the folds. Because her brows are fairly thick, I'm going to block them in as geometric shapes for now and then come back later and add details. This will give me an idea of where the thickest areas of the brows are and where the arch is. I want to make sure the angle of her lips are correct, so I'm using my pencil again to compare the direction of the cupid's bow and lips and just redefining the shape. I know the corners of the mouth align with the centers of the eyes, so I'm just going to double-check to see if I need to make any adjustments. I'm darkening in the corners of the lips slightly to help them appear more set in the face and define the areas where the lips meet. This is going to be the darkest part of the mouth where no light is getting through since the lips in my reference photo are closed. I can see that I need to make some adjustments to the shape of the face and the chin. I'm using my pencil and I'm lining it up with the reference photo and using that to compare the angles with what I drew and the photo that I have. It's really important to remember that you'll be making little adjustments as you go and not get too caught up with having your drawing look perfect right away. It just takes a little bit of time and some observation, so just keep going. I'm defining the shape of the face and I can see that the neck was a little bit further over than it was my photo. You can also use your pencil to compare the direction of the hair. I'm just going to add a few extra wisps in. It doesn't have to be perfect, it just has to follow the same general direction as the hair in my reference. Then I'm going to erase some of my extra pencil marks and then we'll start to add our highlights and shadows. In the next lesson we'll talk about highlights and shadows which is one of my favorite parts of portrait drawing. We'll talk about hatching and simplifying shadows and highlights into shapes. Keep going we're almost there. I'll see you next in highlights and shadows. 8. Adding Highlights and Shadows: [MUSIC] It's time to start adding highlights and shadows to our drawing and to do that, we're going to be doing something called hatching. We'll also be simplifying our highlights and shadows into shapes. Hatching is just a technique that uses lines to create value. The closer the lines are together, the darker something appears, the farther apart the lines are, the lighter something appears. You can also use crosshatching, which is exactly the way that it sounds. It's hatching but the lines are crisscrossed. I've created a value scale and it's in the resource section of this class. So you can actually practice creating one on your own. The first thing we're going to do is start identifying where the highlights are. The highlights are going to be anywhere that the light is touching our subject and those are generally the forehead, the tip of the nose, the bridge of the nose, the bottom lip and the chin area. What I usually do is I just simplify those highlight areas into organic shapes. The cheeks are another really good area. Anywhere that the parts of the face protrude out or stick out farther where the light is going to touch. [MUSIC] You've been a little bit in the corners. On the outside edge of the nostril is, there's going to be a little bit of reflection or sun hitting the face and then I can see there's just a really slight reflection on the bottom of the neck there and I can see there's one up on the upper side of the forehead. So what I'm doing is I'm drawing these reflections and these organic shapes and they're following the curves and the forms of the skull and the shape of the head. I'm coming back in and I'm starting to define other areas on my drawing, like the earrings and shading in those darker parts. So the bottom of this earring here, I know it's very dark. I can see that there is a shadow here on the bottom of the earring, and then the upper part is in highlight. [MUSIC] I also noticed that there's a slight reflection right above the brow bone. Again, the upper part of the brow bone sticks out from the face a little bit. So you're going to have just a light reflection there too and again, it's going to depend on the position of the reference photo that you're using but in the one that I'm using, I can definitely see there's a little bit of a reflection above her brow bones. The next thing we're going to do is identify where the shadows are. The shadows on the face generally fall around the eyes and the eyelash area and the pupils. The pupils are going to be the darkest area of the face. In the eye area, the one thing you don't want to do is to draw every individual eyelash because it's going to make your eyes look less realistic than more realistic. So you just want to darken in the eyeline area rather than draw each individual eyelash. The eyebrows are also going to be another area where you're going to find some shadow as well. Again, they're going to cast shadows along the upper eyelids. Again, you don't want to draw every individual eyebrow. You just want to give an indication of the shape of the brows. This is where that hatching technique is really going to come in useful. The thicker the brows are the closer you can draw those lines together, the thinner the brows, you can start spreading those lines out, those hatching techniques farther apart. The nostrils is another place where there's a lot of strong shadows. Inside the nostrils themselves is one of the darkest areas of the face because there's very little light unless the face is tilted up. In this photo, the subject is facing the camera. So her nostrils are very, dark. The edges and the corners around the nose where the folds are, another area where there's going to be a lot of shadow as well. So again, we don't want to outline the nose, we just want to give a little bit of an indication of shadow. So again, you can just lightly hatch in those areas. Again, the closer the lines are, the darker the shadow. The farther apart the lines are the lighter the shadow. So underneath the tip of the nose is another area where there is a lot of shadow. Again, it's going to depend on the reference photo that you're using. It's also going to depend a lot on the direction of the light of the photo that you're using as well. For this photo, there's a lot of light shining directly on the front of her face and the tip of her nose underneath has a lot of shadow. So the nose is actually casting a shadow on the upper lip, which is where you see another dark area of the face. The upper lip tends to be much darker because the nose is casting a shadow on it. What we're going to do is just darken in that area. I'm following the shape of the lips. I'm drawing curved hatch lines to allow the lips to look more rounded. So those ovals that I use as a guide to create the lip shapes, those are going to make the lips look a lot more plump and round. That bottom lip where there's a highlight where the light is touching, just above that highlight is where there is another strong shadow where the upper lip casts a slight shadow over the bottom lip. Just beneath the lower lip, There's a very strong shadow between the bottom lip and the chin and again, how dark the shadow is going to depend on your subject. So on my subject, I can see that there is a slight shadow underneath her bottom lip. She does have some round full lips and her upper lip is very dark. So i'm just going to erase a little bit of this shading that I created there because her face is not very dark. There's a lot of even light. So there aren't a lot of strong shadows. Where the cheeks protrude out, there are reflections but underneath that there's a little bit of a cast shadow from where the cheek sink into the face a bit. Then in the inner corners of the eyes, where the eyes sit in the skull, there's also a bit of a shadow as well. You want to be careful not to outline the eyes and just again, slightly shade in that area and not outline them to either make the eyes look too dark, too sunken or if you outline them too much or darken it too much, you can also make your subject look older than they are. You want to make sure that you leave a highlight in the pupils for that reflection because when the light hits the eyes, there's always that little twinkle. You want to make sure that you leave that so that the eyes have a little bit of life in them. If for some reason you do color in the pupil completely, you can just go back in with your eraser and erase it out and remove it. When you are dealing with shadows in the hair, It's really important that you don't just color it in completely. So what I'm doing is I'm just defining these wisps of hair and just darkening them in because right around her face, it's very, dark and then I'm just going to give an indication so that you can see a bit of the shading and give her hair some more dimension. Then I'm going to come back in and finish that eyebrow that I hadn't finished earlier. [MUSIC] You want to make sure that you're not outlining the nose and you're just shading the sides of the nose and you're actually hatching with the shape of the features instead of up and down or left to right. Underneath the eyes, up above the highlights on the cheekbones is another area where there's a bit of a shadow that you can see as well. I'm just going back in and redefining and darkening any areas of shadow that I think need to be darkened. Then I'm just going to go back in and darken some of the areas beneath the cheekbones. Where the hair falls across the face, you'll notice that there's a shadow. If your subject has very short hair, you might not have this. If your subject has their hair pulled completely up on their face and there's no hair falling down across the forehead, you might not have a shadow from the hair either and then I'm going in defining the shape of the jaw line and making any minor corrections to the areas of the chin, the brow bone and starting to darken in the edges around her face so that the shape of her skull really starts to stand out. So now it's just a matter of adding a little bit of detail and defining a little bit of the clothing down here. I'm just going to clean this up a little bit and define the shadow underneath her neck and darken that into that. Her face has a little bit more definition from her neck and shoulder area. What that's also going to do is allow that highlight that's under there to stand out as well so that you can see that her neck has some dimension and then where her hair parts at the top of her head, we want to make sure that we define that as well. So again, I'm just giving an indication I'm not drawing in every single little hair. I'm just giving a direction as to where the hair is going. It's really important that you sketch in the direction of the hair and the flow of the hair to make it look more realistic for your subject and then I'm just going to go back in and darken in her lashes on her upper eye and lower eyelids and then just go ahead and redefine those eyes. I just want to darken in the eyes just a bit and make sure that the upper part of the pupil is shaded in a little bit because the upper lid is going to leave a bit of a shadow on the eyeball area. Then when you're done, don't forget to sign and date your work because when you look back at your sketches, you want to be able to see where you started to, how far you've progressed. You did it. I'm so proud of you and you should be too. I can't wait to see what you've created. So don't forget to post your work in the class project section and if you have any questions, please post them in the comment section of this class. I'll see you up next in the final thoughts. [MUSIC]. 9. Final Thoughts: Thank you for taking this class. I really hope that you learned a lot and that the skills that we discussed help your drawing in whatever medium you choose to work with. I encourage you to get creative and to explore a different medium when you're practicing these skills. We've covered everything from choosing a reference to understanding placement of the features, simplifying the structure of the head, drawing the features to checking our work, and refining our drawing. If there's one thing I hope you take away from this class is that you can draw a portrait successfully. You have all the skills you need. With practice and time, your skills will only get better. Keep a sketchbook of your work and be sure to mark the date, so you can go back and see how your work has improved over time. Remember, you can keep coming back to these skills again and again. I'd love to see your finished work or any creative spin you put on it. So, please post a class project and don't forget to comment on other student's work and offer them some encouragement. If you enjoyed this class, please leave me a review. It would really mean a lot and help me when planning my future classes. Don't forget to follow me here on Skillshare to hear about my classes and giveaways. Thank you again for spending time with me and taking this course. I hope to see you soon in another one of my classes.