Drawing a portrait

The portrait is one of the most popular but also one of the most difficult to master disciplines in art.

You can learn how to draw faces with the following article. The possibility of depicting the image of a person with pencil, charcoal or paint on a two-dimensional surface has fascinated artists since the beginning of time. But how do you actually learn to draw portraits?

Anyone who goes to an art supply store or the art section of a bookstore these days will be inundated with books with titles like "Portrait Drawing Made Easy" or "Portrait Drawing for Beginners." However, you should be extremely cautious with these and similar books. Books of this type often teach you how to draw a specific subject, such as a portrait of a young woman, using strict step-by-step instructions and provide a quick sense of achievement. However, if you try to apply the techniques you have learned to your own subjects, you will quickly run into great difficulties.

This is because to successfully draw a portrait you need to have mastered the important basics of drawing, such as proportions, light and shadow, and tonal values for representation.

The textbooks mentioned above skip this step, which often requires years of training to learn. But as with all things you want to be serious about, there are no shortcuts in art. If you really want to be able to draw any portrait from any angle, you have no choice but to start from scratch and work your way through. So a budding portrait artist starts at the same point as an artist who wants to paint still lifes, flowers or landscapes.

There are some books on portraiture that do not attempt to skip the basics: "Drawing the Head and Hands" by Andrew Loomis or "Drawing the Human Head" by Burne Hogarth, for example, are excellent books for studying portraiture. However, such books require a certain amount of prior knowledge and often accompany the artist throughout his life.

Even a classical drawing training at an academy, under an experienced teacher, teaches you the necessary skills to become a portrait artist.

But the most important ingredient for success is practice. No book or teacher in the world can do the work for you of producing the thousands of drawings you need before you start seeing success (when learning to draw portraits).

The most important lesson when learning to draw portraits is: practice makes perfect!