Portrait Drawing Tips

One of the classic and most popular themes in drawing is realistic portraits. A realistic portrait drawing is one of the most difficult exercises in art. Because our eyes are trained on the recognition of faces, we make errors and inconsistencies when portrait drawing. But even if we recognise that something on the drawing is incorrect, it can be very difficult to say where the fault lies.

I enjoy drawing realistic portraits and have given some general advice that I believe will help you on your way to getting your portraits to look real and lifelike. I want to give you some clues about what you have to consider when drawing or painting the face. If you want to learn to draw people, hopefully you will find some helpful tips.

Before you try to draw the face of a certain person, you should first consider some basics. Particularly important when drawing a face are the proportions. Of course, every person looks different, but many basic proportions are nearly always the same and these are where most of the typical errors are for beginners. For example, the height of the forehead and the position of the eyes while drawing a portrait must be observed. Often, it is intuitively drawn too low, making the eyes in the face slip up too far.

The eyes are somewhere in the middle of the face. When I started to draw faces this is where I often went wrong. I thing the hairline makes the eyes appear higher on the head than the really are.

Use the nose as a kind of measure when drawing faces. The eyes divide the face in half. The forehead is about two noses high. The height of the whole face is about four noses! Also for the width of the face, there are important clues that you should consider when drawing or painting a portrait.

• Often what is overlooked when drawing a face is that the area either side of the eyes is approximately the width of one eye.


• The distance between the eyes is another eye length wide.


• So the face is approximately five eye lengths wide.

Above all though have fun when drawing and painting, and practice as much as you can! Remember that you can't do any harm. Another good tip is to keep all of your drawings no matter how bad you think they are. Then you have a collection of your work to show you how you are improving each time.

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Mark is the author of the blog drawing for beginners where we discuss what's needed to teach people to draw portraits. If you want to learn more about drawing visit us there!

Article Source: Portrait Drawing Tips