Foundations for Better Portrait Drawing

Portrait drawing is hard. We tend to make it even harder by focusing on the wrong things and by getting in our own way. We dwell on blunt criticisms and start to become unwilling to listen to any critique about our work, without realizing that some of those opinions can be very enlightening if we don't take them personally. With that in mind, today I'm going to talk about some ways to give your portraits a stronger foundation, both by getting more of the structure right and by drawing in a way that makes it less important to be right in the first place. The relationships between the features are more important than the handling of the features themselves. How the face is organized matters more than the individual parts. You can draw the most beautifully rendered eyes, nose, and mouth, but if they don't work together in a convincing way, it's always going to look a little weird, and no amount of gorgeous detail will matter. There are lots of ways to organize these relationships. Your method of construction, if you follow one, plays a major role here. And apart from your particular method, you will often come across little alignment tricks and visual tools that you can use to help you check your work. Maybe these are anatomical truths that you can rely on, or maybe they're pieces of other, broader methods that you may or may not follow completely. Like a few favorite Reilly rhythms, for instance, or paying attention to the rule of thirds from Loomis. Remember that the goal of all portrait drawing methods is essentially the same, so using bits of wisdom you find within different drawing strategies is perfectly fine. Different artists will also find different things useful. Personally, I like to use simple, broad ideas that I can visualize from different angles. One of my favorites is this triangle using the corners of the eyes and the philtrum as a way to check the width and position of the nose from different viewpoints. And if I use comparative measurements, I use broader distances, rather than incremental ones using something small, like, say, an eye width. I might compare the overall width of the head to the height, for instance, but I'm probably not going to try and find the height of the face by measuring out seven eye widths. Another example of thinking about relationships rather than simple alignments is the position of the ears in relation to the features in a front-facing view. We know that the top of the ears is somewhere around the brow line, and that the bottom of the ears is somewhere near the base of the nose. Great, but it's important to understand that this is only true visually from this specific viewpoint. When we start to tilt the head even a little bit, those alignments aren't anywhere near where they were, and requires you to think about how these things relate to each other three-dimensionally, rather than a simple horizontal alignment. At some point during your drawing, put your pencil down, stand back, and consider how different areas of your drawing are relating to one another, rather than how accurate they are to the reference. Leave your model or reference out of it for this part. Just evaluate your portrait and ask yourself if there are issues, anatomical issues, mechanical issues, just from the standpoint of a generic human rather than a specific human, and if there are issues, they are likely related to form and relationships rather than likeness or detail. The head and face are mostly made up of rounded forms. You don't see a lot of straight edges unless you're really looking for them. But when we build a portrait with gentle curves and vague shapes, it can end up looking a bit amorphous and blobby, kind of like it's made of dough. Working out the geometry and symmetry of a portrait in a more angular way can help to inject a feeling of strength and structure into the overall form, which you can then refine and round out when you've gotten the basic framework down, if you choose to. But consider that some of those straighter, harder edges are giving the face a sense of structure. Maybe it's an indication of the skull just under the surface, or some other bit of anatomy, but they imply a structural support under the areas of softer flesh. This is a similar concept to a block-in, which is just constructing the head and face in a more angular, blocky way. There's strength and solidity in that blocky construction, and you can lean on that some. This angularity also gets you thinking about planes, and makes it easier to see or imagine those planes, kind of like in a sorrow head. Seeing the entire form represented as flat planes can make it simpler to construct than seeing it as soft, overlapping shapes. It's just another way of simplifying. A lot of people, myself included, find it easier to accurately judge size and shape and to simplify that shape with straighter lines. Even when you're drawing something that's very curvy, it's hard to mimic that curve without it looping out of shape somewhere. Simplifying that curve into angles helps you to control that shape, and tends to make it easier to get that shape right. Okay, so here's the secret about drawing loosely. It's easier, and you don't need to be as accurate when you do so. When you draw in a sharply defined way, hard-edged and unambiguous, it's very unforgiving, because you're making very specific statements. You're saying that's exactly where this is. When you're drawing loosely, you're not really doing that. You're suggesting, and you're implying. You're saying, it's around here somewhere. You figure it out. And if you've gotten enough of it right, and made good suggestions, then your viewer will happily comply, and subconsciously fill in all the blanks. And here's the thing. It's also more interesting. You're engaging the viewer in the process, and making them participants rather than simply a viewer. I talk about different mediums being an expressive medium, or an unforgiving medium, but the kind of general easy vibe I'm talking about here, you can express with any drawing medium. You can draw in a loose and relaxed way with something really unforgiving, like ink, as well as you can with, say, charcoal. So how does one learn to draw loosely? I said earlier that it was easier, but that's somewhat misleading. Drawing anything is easier once you've developed a loose and easy facility for drawing. But developing that quality is one of those things that, unfortunately, there's just no shortcut for. It has a lot to do with familiarity. Familiarity with your subject matter, with your medium, and familiarity with drawing itself. There's also an aspect of muscle memory to it, kind of like a musician playing an instrument. It's not just about knowledge of human anatomy, or keen observations. Some of that loose, easy quality simply comes from the fact that you've drawn this thing, whatever that is, many, many, many times. I'm tiptoeing around telling you that you should practice a lot, so I'll say it this way. Your hundredth drawing will be much stronger than your first or your fifth, so get to the hundredth one. And give yourself permission to make some ugly drawings. There will likely be a lot of them. It isn't wasted effort any more than time spent in a classroom is wasted effort. You learn as much from a drawing you throw away as one that you put into a frame. In the intro to this video, I talked about people pointing out flaws in your portraits, and unfortunately, some of that is inevitable. I get it all the time. All I can tell you is that it will happen less as your work improves, and more importantly, you will care a lot less as your work improves, and you become more focused on other aspects of your drawing. My favorite part of making videos on YouTube and Patreon is the notion that something I've said has made a small difference for a hopeful portrait artist. I hope you got something of value from this video. I love hearing your questions and comments, and I will respond if I'm able to. Take care, everyone.