When I first got into drawing portraits, it seemed overwhelming. There was a LOT to learn! I have found no other subject, however, that has taught me more about the importance of lighting and being able to view your subject both in the close-up, fine details and as a whole.
It took a very long time to learn to draw a realistic face and then a very long time after that to draw a face that resembled the person I was trying to draw and then yet another very long time after that, even, to draw a realistic, clearly recognizable likeness of the person I was trying to draw. If you're thinking of learning portraiture, let me just say that it is a process. You have to want it, you have to have tons of patience, and you have to mess up a whole lot.
That having been said, you can save yourself some time by learning from the mistakes of others who have been doing it a while. Some of these, I had to find out on my own and some I learned from other artists.
Leaving the whites of the eyes white. The whites of the eyes are never white. They have shadow just like the rest of the face. The only part of the entire picture that should be white is the light reflection, or gleam, in the eye. That's it. Everything else is shaded. This sounds weird and feels totally unnatural when you're drawing, but you have to trust the process. A shaded eye is so much more realistic than a stark white one, which looks flat and dimensionless.
Using hard lines. So absolutely little of the face is hard lines. I always say that portraits are 98% shading. The only areas where you should have any hard lines are around the eyes, the middle line of the lips, the sides of the nostrils, the outline of the face, and sometimes deep wrinkles, folds, and scars. Everything else a result of shading or is a soft suggestion of a line, using tortillions or blending stumps.
Drawing lines around the lips. Lips don't have outlines. Remember that. They're darker pigmentation with their own sets of lines and wrinkles, but they do not have outlines. Not unless your subject is wearing lipstick. The best way that I've found to draw lips is by starting with the middle line and then using a slightly softer lead than the one I'm working in to lightly shade the suggestion of the shape of the lips and then blending it with a blending stump. You'll be amazed how much more realistic a pair of lips you can draw simply by avoiding using an outline.
Drawing football shapes for eyes. What?! But isn't that the standard shape of an eye?! Not exactly. If you look closely at your subject's eye, you're sure to see a more complex shape - often the bottom of the eye is more flat and straight while the top tends to have most of the curve on either the right or left side as opposed to the middle. The inside of the eye juts in toward the nose and sometimes dips downward. Your brain will always want to draw a football shape because our brains like to break things down into the simplest terms. But, if you really study your subject's eye, you'll find that it's much more complex than that.
Using individual lines for hair. All these years later, hair is still my least favorite thing to draw. I don't think I'll ever enjoy it. This section really needs its own blog post, it's so complex. I'll just touch on the basics. The thing about hair is that you have to think of it in clumps instead of individual strands. The clumps have to have their own highlights, mid-tones, and shadows. Individual hairs can be added in here and there, but really, when drawing hair, it's all about illusion. You can't make realistic hair by trying to draw each individual strand. Hair responds to light. It shines. It moves. It flows in different directions. This is why you have to draw it the way your brain perceives it - as a series of solid masses. For some people, this just clicks. For me, I've had to work at it and work at it and I still don't feel totally good about the hair in my portraits. But, I'm also kind of a perfectionist (as are most of us), so there's that.
Not using an outline. I'll explain what I mean. Back when I first started delving into portraits, I had a method to drawing them: I would start with the eyes, then draw the nose, then the mouth, and finally, I would add the cheeks, chin, ears, and hair. I could have saved myself SO MUCH TIME and frustration if I would have just made a brief, light outline of the entire portrait before I began. This allows the artist to decide the placement of the features and to see them along with the rest of the face -as a whole - to determine if the proportions are off or the eyes aren't even or whatever! And it's much, much, MUCH easier to correct. Doing a simple outline as a road map before beginning my drawing has improved my portraiture so much. It felt unnatural, at first, and the outline looked ugly and not like the subject at all (as it will, because it's just general shapes), but WOW, what a difference it made.
These are just a few of the myriad of mistakes that I know I personally made as a beginning portrait artist and that many others commonly make, too. Hopefully, these pointers will help you to make your next portrait drawing even better. Practice makes perfect, so keep creating! :)
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