In this Skillshare class you’ll learn a simple and practical four step process to get started sketching, drawing and painting portraits and faces straight away. It’s an easy and flexible process for creating expressive portraits, and the focus on the class is learning by doing, and understanding how to simplify the process and make your portrait sketches more easy and enjoyable.

If you’re anything like me you really just want to get out there, make art, and learn by doing. Not spend hours and hours learning technical details and theory – and that is exactly what this class is all about!

Who am I?

I’m Toby, known as Toby Urbansketch, and I teach and practice the art of sketching.

Sketching aims to capture the essence of something, be that a portrait, figure or human, or even an expansive landscape or cute still life. In sketching we take visual shortcuts, and create stylistic images, rather than focussing on producing a perfect image. In fact, I would argue that many of my favourite sketches are because of the imperfections or random acts of joy that appear when we experiment a little.

My mission is to show people that anything is sketchable, and that anyone can have fun sketching and drawing.

How I sketch portraits

When we are sketching people and portraits, we aren’t looking for a perfect likeness, but exploring our own creativity and having some fun with ink and sketching. We usually still want our portrait to be believable, and recognisable as the person in question – but we also accept, embrace and enjoy the creative process that simplifies our sketch, capturing just those vital details.

We don’t NEED to learn all the theory for this, we can sketch anything by simplifying, being loose, using shapes, and measuring using simple observational skills.

My process for sketching portraits doesn’t use clever theory, just basic observation. I break people down into shapes, I make life easy for myself and I accept mistakes. Bold lines help build up a more accurate sketch, whilst also adding interest through contrast.

When it comes to tone and colour, there are so many options and mediums to explore. I typically use watercolours, or watercolour or ink brush pens, to create subtle layering of tone – which further builds on our high contrast but simple sketch.

What will we cover?

In this class we'll cover the essentials of equipment and choosing your reference, before getting straight into sketching where I will talk you through ever aspect of my sketching process, including little hints and tips that I've picked up over the years.

Highlights to look out for include:

A gallery of example portraits in my style
An in depth look at differnet supplies, and how to use them - there is no absolutely required list of equipment for this class!
7 tips on how to choose your reference
A sketching process that requires simple observational skills, not complex theory
How to use tone and contrast to bring your sketch to life
How colour can be used in a unique way, to make your sketch pop

Make it simple!

In this class, the lessons are all about making life flexible and enjoyable – and a lot of that is simplifying what we’re doing.

There is no long list of required equipment – instead, I’ll walk you through the types of things you might use and also show you how I use them to create layers, tone and a splash of colour.

We’ll also look at selecting our reference. Too often I hear people say they ‘just can’t sketch people!’. What they don’t understand is that even the famous masters are very selective over their reference.

They didn’t just sketch anyone, in any pose. No, they picked and picked until they have their pose and person just right, enabling them to create incredible art.

We’ll cover 7 great tips to keep your reference simple, making your processes and art much more enjoyable to create.

The art of sketching not perfecting!

Fundamentally, this class is about sketching.

I am not the world’s greatest, well, anything I suppose! But definitely not the best portrait artist.

What I do is sketch and paint a lot, and draw and sketch a lot of people, and, most importantly… I ENJOY sketching and painting people.

The reason for this is that I have a simple process, I enjoy doing it, I don’t get lost in details, and I don’t get upset if it’s not a perfect likeness because I’ve learned to enjoy the creation and not just the finished image.

Who is the class for?

This is for anyone who wants to start sketching people and portraits - beginners and absolute beginners are always welcome.

Those with a little drawing experience, and understanding how to capture basic shapes may gain the most, as they'll be happy jumping straight into the sketching.

Whilst more advanced sketchers may enjoy a different style, and seeing how they incorporate these techniques into their own practice!

Join me!

So, if this sounds like your kind of thing, please join me in the lessons and lets get sketching!

If you do enjoy, please consider leaving a review to help me improve, and to help others find my class and know what they're getting themselves in for :)

Credits:

Made with Filmora

Audio Credits:

"Apero Hour" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Credits:

Made with Wondershare Filmora

Susanne Bollier

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