Quirky Portraits: Get Loose With Continuous Line Drawing!

1. Introduction: Hi, I'm Emily. I teach graphite pencil drawing to beginners and improvers. And in this project, we're going to experiment with continuous line drawing to draw fun and quirky portraits from photographs. This project will help improve your observation skills and your hand eye coordination. But most of all, it's about loosening up and having a bit of fun. With this method we're going to use, you definitely won't get an exact likeness of the photo. That's why it's called quirky portraits. So don't worry about that. Just be brave, dive in and see what happens. 2. Materials: For materials, you'll need a dark pencil like a four B grade, or you could use an ink pen and you'll need some paper. Let's get started. 3. Warm Up: Continuous Line Drawing: Okay, let's go. So this one is definitely going to test your ego because we're going to be drawing faces, but you're not going to get a realistic result. So we really need to let that go right now. And we're going to be practicing getting a connection between our hand and our eye. We're not going to be doing any proportion, any measuring like that. We're going to be drawing continuously. So if you've done some contour drawing or continuous line drawing, you'll know what this feels like, but we're going to speed it up and just have a bit of fun with it. So you might need two pages for this one. The first one is going to be a little bit of an experimentation and some practice, and then we'll draw some quirky faces. For this exercise, we're going to be using a dark pencil. So I've got a six B pencil. You could even use an ink pen if you really want to. But the point of using a dark pencil is, we're not going to be rubbing anything out. So whatever line we draw, that's the line that stays on our page, and we can just keep reworking and drawing over top. And to practice that and get into that feeling of, you know, not worrying and just letting things go, the first thing we're going to do is simply start doodling. So you're going to push fairly firmly and just start moving your hand around, maybe focus in a little bit and make some shapes. I want to get used to this feeling of the hand just moving continuously or the pencil moving continuously, not thinking so much about what we're doing, but just moving. And when we put this into practice with our faces, we're going to keep our hand moving, but we're also going to be observing at the same time, and we're going to try and make a connection between this moving hand and our eye, our moving eye as it roams over the subjects edges and contours. You see how nice and dark that line is. My pencil is starting to get a little bit blunt, so when it does that, sometimes I'll turn it around a little bit, just on its tip one way or the other, and get a sharper line that way. It's almost like you're sharpening the pencil on the paper as you go. But you can always stop and sharpen if you want to. The only problem with stopping to sharpen your pencil is sometimes then you get out of that zone and you might become a little bit self conscious about your drawing. So there's my doodle. We're going to go straight into practicing these lovely things, these ears. A little bit less pressure with ears because they're really weird and strange looking anyway. You're going to choose a point to start on the ear. And remember, we're keeping our pencil moving continuously. I'm going to start about here and I'm going to work my way around this way and come down, and then I'll start, you know, moving in. And the thing with the continuous line is we're not taking our pen or our pencil off the paper, so there might be times where you're sort of having to double back and redraw, and we'll get something that looks quite organic and, I think, quite interesting, as well, and it may not look exactly like an ear. But what we're aiming for with this is to capture something of that ear that we wouldn't get ordinarily if we're trying to carefully sketch out all the proportions and everything. And we're also aiming to get our hand moving with our eye and recording what we see. Even if we record it wrong sometimes, we're practicing the art of observation and trying to get our hand and our brain and our eye all connected together. So starting up there, I'm just going to start drawing. In terms of practicing the observational part, the trick is to not be staring at your paper. So actually, you can't see my eyes, but I'm actually looking mostly at the photograph, and then I'm flicking my eye to the drawing just to make sure my hand is going in the right place. Now, what people tend to do is the opposite. They'll be staring at their drawing and flicking their eye to the photograph. But I want you to think about trying to spend as much time looking when your hand is moving, looking at the photograph. And so that might be all I do for that one. And I know it's definitely not right. I'm going to miss I think I've missed a line in here. But I've got the general kind of shape and I've observed all the different parts of it. Let's move on to another ear. This is still a practice. We've got one more to practice. I'm going to start at the top again and work my way around, but work in whatever direction, start at whatever point feels most comfortable for you. Just make sure that pencil is always moving and you're looking the whole time at that ear and just flicking your eye to your drawing. The priority is looking at the ear. The hand is moving as we look, and every now and again, you're just flicking back to the drawing just to check that your hand is actually going sort of in the way that you need to. Maybe when I turn a corner here, I'm very quickly flicking my eye to my page. Keeping the same kind of pressure all the time, sliding my hand along the page. Now, if you get to a point and you sort of can't join it up, then you can definitely draw from one place to another. It doesn't have to be following a contour all the time. I'm just working my way around seeing if there's anything else that I can put in there up here. So if I saw something, you know, over here that I wanted to put in, I can draw across there, but I want to be looking as I do that, as well. And obviously, when you do that, you're going to get, you know, these lines that aren't actually part of the subject, but that's okay. And I'm probably overdoing this a little bit now, as I've been talking away. So that's my second year. And, you know, it's not a realistic, obviously, but can you see something of the shape that's maybe similar or, you know, maybe there's something inside that you might not normally have actually looked at because there's just so much happening there. 4. Quirky Portrait 1: There's our practice. Hopefully, you're feeling nice and loose now. We're going to move on to faces. This is going to be really fun, but you will feel a little bit of resistance as things don't turn out exactly like you want them to because we don't have a lot of control. Remember, we're practicing just pure observation and trying to get our hand moving nice and freely and connecting with our brain and our eye. There's no pressure, or there shouldn't be any pressure. Take that pressure off yourself to be able to draw. These faces realistically. We're thinking of it as a doodle, just like this here, but we're trying to practice observation as we do our doodles. So I'm going to change pages. I'm going to do three faces with you. There are some more faces if you want to practice some more in your own time, but I'll just do one, two, three, and keep them quite small. I know we did the ear quite big, but we've got to think about how we fit these onto our page, if you want to do a little collection. However, if you feel like you want to go big, that's fine, too. You can set up a big piece of paper. It's really fun, and, um, and it feels really nice, you know, just to kind of, like, throw the pencil around and move your whole body as you're drawing, as well. Let's start with this one here. Now, some of these faces have glasses or hats, and they're a really good place to start because they kind of give you something something structural to base your drawing around or to start with. So I'm going to start in the middle of the glasses. And I'm just going to work my way around the glasses to start with. And I'll show you what I mean about having to draw lines between things. So, you know, I've got these glasses in here now, and they're not the right shape. That's fine. They may be on the right angle, which is good. But now I've got to get to the eye, so I'm literally going to draw straight to the eye there. I'm not stopping and starting. I'm not lifting my pencil off the paper. Same with the eyebrow. I mean, it could be tempting when you're doing this, because it is so hard and because we've got nothing to rely on, it might be tempting to just draw an eye the way that you think an eye looks like, but I do want you to carefully observe. Remember, we're keeping our eye mostly on the photograph. And I can make some corrections here if I want to, so just change the shape of those glasses. Come down here for the nose. How can I join that up to the mouth? I've got this crease coming down the side here. I can come across to the mouth and then put the mouth corner of the mouth in. And it's probably not even gonna look like the person. It should look something like a person. But forgive yourself if it turns out looking kind of creepy or a little bit ugly, that's totally fine for this project. And it's actually what makes them quirky. We've called this one quirky quirky portraits. O So I started to go up here and that's totally the wrong angle. I know I'm not going for something realistic, but I am going for observation, so I've just come back to that point and then straightened out on the angle that I want it to be on. You can back up down your lines. You can redraw over top of your lines. Not to try and make it look good or make it look perfect, but to try and copy or transcribe what your eye is seeing with your pencil. In the corner of the glasses there. And I think that's probably all. If I wanted to, I could maybe put in a little bit more detail around the eyes. We're not shading, but I might be able to see, you know, the crease under the eye there. Maybe I can see some shapes in the eye, only drawing what I see, not drawing what I think the eye should look like. So, this portrait number one looks kind of creepy, but also kind of interesting. I've got like these sorts of portraits. Now we're going to move on. I don't think I'm gonna be able to fit three onto my page. So maybe I'm gonna do one, two, and then I'll do the third one on another page. And that's just because of the drawing size that feels more natural to me. 5. Quirky Portrait 2: Let's go with this one. Again, we've got something structural there to hang things on. We could start with a hat or, you know, maybe that line of the hat, and then maybe working into the ear because we've already done a bit of practice with ear, so I'm going to start up the top here. Start wherever feels most comfortable for you. I work my way down. Even drawing this line, I know it's straight, but I'm running my eye along it, and I'm not drawing until my eye reaches the point that I want to draw, if that makes sense. I'm not speeding ahead. I'm not looking and then drawing. I'm looking or I'm drawing as I look. It's okay to not get everything down right first, so I'm exploring this ear. Trying to figure it out. You know, it's quite small compared to everything else. So there might be some parts I put in that aren't right. I might need to add parts that I sort of missed. Now, I got to think about, how am I going to get over to the eyes? I'm going to come across the top of the hair, and then I might actually come down where I think the nose is going to go and then work my way backwards. But again, whatever feels best for you, you could go straight across the face if you want to draw a line, but draw as you observe that crossing over the face. So what I mean is as you draw across the face, you're actually looking across the face, as well. Maybe you can see some shapes of shadow. You can definitely draw those in. Not really any right or wrong as to what you draw, as long as it's something that you see. So if you are watching me do this, sometimes you'll see me drawing actual parts of the face, and sometimes you'll see me drawing as I move from one part to another. So making a connection between one part by actually drawing, even if there isn't any kind of feature there or isn't any, you know, strong line there, I'm drawing it. I'm drawing where my eye is going. And sometimes I'm looking across to see how things line up as well. So when I just put that top of the hat in here, I was looking at where that lined up with the face, you could actually draw that with the edge of the face. So there's drawing number two. Definitely not perfect, but there's something there of, you know, maybe the mouth. Maybe you saw something that you wouldn't normally see, like I noticed this plane under the nose. The shape of that nostril I see it's wrong now, but that's okay. We're going to move on to one more, and then I'll leave you to do a few on your own. 6. Quirky Portrait 3: So this one's an interesting one. We've got a hat. We've got a face that is nice and sort of craggy with wrinkles. And we've got that mustache and the cigarette, as well, which might help us kind of frame some things. So think about where you want to start. I think for this one, I might start with the eyes, and then I can bring the hat up, and if I don't have room for the hat, that's okay. If I start at the top of the hat and come down, I might run out of room for the rest of the face. I'm going to start on the left eye here. You can stop if you need to, you know, if you just like, I can't I can't quite see it. Take a little break, but don't take your pencil off the paper. Just give your eye a little bit of time to adjust. And as I'm drawing down here from the eye down to the nose, I'm essentially measuring that even though we're not measuring it the way we normally would, I'm measuring it by drawing that distance as I run my eye down that distance. I guess, I've got the nose in here. Mustache is good to give you some structure, hang things on. Your line can be wriggly. It doesn't have to be straight, even if you see a straight line. I can have wobbles in it, and sometimes it actually makes these portraits a little bit more forgiving because, you know, they look like they're supposed to be like that. They're supposed to be wriggly, wonky, maybe drawn with the wrong hand or something. And if I get to somewhere that doesn't quite line up with something that I've already done, then this probably does line up, but I was thinking this cheek might come over too far. Then, you know, you just redraw redraw over the top. This is a good example where I'm looking across the drawing as well. I'm thinking about where the ear lines up with the eye, the top of the ear lines up with the eye. Putting in some of the hat there. And, you know, I got to get back down to the neck, so I'm just going to work my way down and maybe add in anything else that I see as I go. Thinking about where the shoulder is in line with the moustache, the tip of the moustache. Some of these marks in the neck, it's gonna have to have a lip at some point. Drawing what I can see, not what I think I should be drawing. Even if I'm drawing it wrong, I'm drawing I'm having a go at drawing what I see. Maybe some of these marks around the eye. I got a shadow of the hat. I'm just going to work my way down the left side here. I want to get down to that shoulder, but I'm looking again as I go drawing over top. Not even necessarily correcting, but just redrawing again so that I'm not just, you know, dragging my way down. I'm almost measuring my way down, you know, checking or putting in the pieces where they should go, rather than just going, Oh, I want to get down here and starting down here. Finding the gaps between things. And then just taking a little look to see if there's anything extra that I want to add that maybe I've missed. I'm a a little bit of detail to this moustache here. Just showing those different pieces of it, segments of it. A few lines under the ice, what I can see. Maybe some of these creases on a forehead. So that one was really fun. I really enjoyed that one. Maybe I need to put a little bit of a pupil in there. If I could see pupil, I can definitely see a highlight in this eye. But I've included a few more photographs that you might like to draw that have, you know, other interesting things in them glasses and wrinkles and that sort of thing. So I hope you enjoyed this one. It's definitely an ego buster. You know, when I look at this one I quite like, but when I look at this one, there's problems for me with that because it kind of looks like, you know, I haven't got the right angle and that sort of thing. But it's still I think it's still an interesting drawing, and it really got me used to that face. You know, if I was to now draw that face in a more realistic format portrait, I'm a lot more familiar now with some of those things because all I was doing was observing. I wasn't trying to get them perfect and laboring over them. I was just practicing using my eye and my hand together. We did these ones with a dark pencil, but if you want to take this even further, you could have a go with an ink pen, you know, something like this. A nice flowing ink, and there's just even a little bit more pressure, I think, because ink is permanent. But you'll get even stronger result, something that feels even more intentional, as well, because you've used ink pen. I'd really like to know how you felt about this one, about your drawings and about the process, whether you found it liberating or whether you found it really difficult. So please let me know in the comments. I'll see you in the next project.