Portrait Drawing Tips (Facial Proportions)

In this video I'm going to show you how to draw a portrait using pencil. First you really need a great reference photograph and I recommend you take one yourself so that the photo can be of someone meaningful to you. You can take amazing pictures using camera phones today. This photo I took on the left is the original photo taken using the portrait setting on my iPhone. I then was able to switch on the high key light mono function and this turned the background white eliminating all of the distractions and made my photograph black and white. Making your photo black and white is my first recommendation for a pencil portrait. Taking away the color and making your palette only in the gray scale is going to make it much easier for you to see different values of gray. Another tip I want to share is to avoid taking photographs too close up to your subject because this can make them look a little bit cross-eyed and in addition try to avoid having your subject smile showing teeth. Finally my last piece of advice is to take your photograph with your subject lit from the side. In the picture on the left the subject has light facing her. She's facing an open window and on the picture on the right the open window is on the left side of the subject so the light is shining on the left giving more shadows to her right side. This really defines her features. I can't stress enough how important it is to have a good photograph to work from because if you don't like the photograph you're trying to draw you're never going to like your drawing. Now let's talk about basic human proportions. When I begin a portrait drawing I start with an oval or an egg shape. There are other ways to begin but this way works best for me. The eyes are in the center of this oval halfway between the top and the bottom. Our face is also five eyes wide meaning that there's enough space between the eyes and on either side of the eye for one more eye. So when judging the distance and when judging the size that you make the eyes keep this in mind. The nose ends halfway between the eyes and the chin. If you mark this point this will give you an area to start drawing the bottom portion of the nose. Noses tend to be very challenging to draw because they're full of subtle shadows and no strong lines except for the nostrils. So just begin at that bottom point first. Following the nose the lips fall approximately halfway between the nose and the chin. So again mark that point halfway between the bottom of the nose and the chin and that'll give you an estimation of where to place your mouth. And the mouth will never be wider than the center of the eyes. In my photograph you can't really see my subject's ears because her hair is covering the ear. However you should know that the ears fall between the eyebrow and the bottom of the nose. On most people the hairline is halfway between the top of the head and the eyes but people tend to have different sizes of foreheads, different amounts of hair, so this area is where you really have to pay attention to your subject and to their hair and hairstyle. Now I could just continue this drawing here but since I marked some measurements all over it I'm going to start a new one and let you watch how I begin a portrait myself. And when I draw I try to work on all of the facial features at once so I never finish one facial feature before another one. It's all a work in progress until it gets closer to the end. When I begin drawing the facial features I first just consider that basic guide to human proportions that we just talked about but I'm also looking at the particular subject that I am drawing. And when I'm drawing I draw very lightly as well because I know I'm going to make changes as I progress through the drawing. There is such a wide range of the amount of detail that you could add to a portrait. You could simply do a line drawing and leave it at that or you could work on shading and how much you shade or how much detail you put into your drawing is completely personal preference. Go ahead and watch me for a bit. I want you to see how I use both my pencil and my eraser to shade and bring out highlights. To blend the pencil and give subtle variations of value I just use my fingertip to blend the pencil where I want it to go. To make values darker I layer more pencil in those specific areas pressing harder so that I can get more pencil onto the paper. To help not have too many smudges in my drawing what I'll sometimes do is put a piece of paper on top of my hand so that as I'm moving around the drawing I can have my hand rest on that piece of paper instead of smearing my drawing. If I do get smudges and smears on my drawing when I'm finishing it up I'll just use an eraser and I'll just clean up that background space. Portrait drawing is extremely challenging but it is very rewarding as well. All you really need is paper a pencil and a face and you can start from that. The more you practice the better you will get. I hope this video helps you get started on your next portrait drawing. Thanks for watching!