Secrets of Realistic Portrait Drawing | Floriane Kameni | TEDxHarvardCollege

This is the first portrait I ever drew. It's the portrait of a character from an online virtual fashion game called MaBimbo.com. It was very popular in my middle school located in a small suburb east of Paris. If you don't speak French, MaBimbo.com does in fact translate to MyBimbo.com and yes, every girl in my sixth grade class owned a virtual bimbo. I don't know if I should be happy that this drawing is actually a very accurate one or if I should be worried that all of the 11-year-olds in my hometown might all still want to be bimbos when they grow up. Anyway, because I didn't know anything about the notion of artistic abstraction, I really wanted to draw this character as accurately as possible. And I must have been very happy with this piece because I continued to draw throughout my childhood, fervently chasing realism. I quickly discovered that I had entered an extensively studied and cultivated realm of artistic expression, which is portraiture. And for those of us in this hall who are convinced not to have any sort of artistic talent, portraiture is a worldwide historical tradition ready to welcome any of us right here, right now. The fascinating art of portraiture faces the challenge of rendering the exterior while also capturing personality. Hyperrealism has established itself as a distinct genre wherein precise accuracy is paired with a desire to capture the context and emotion surrounding a subject. The truth about realistic portraiture is that it can either be a fascinating, difficult, and sensitive art that requires extensive knowledge and an elevated sense of perception, or it can be a simple art, a skill, not a talent, that anyone can master. Of all the different ways in which you could draw the human face, hyperrealism might actually be the most straightforward, and that's assuming that you're not into stick figures anymore. All you have to do is copy some photograph as best you can. We do, however, fumble and plunder in our attempt at drawing a realistic portrait because we don't know yet how to imitate reality. The art of portraiture is a game of bamboozling and how best to trick the eyes and the brain to perceive reality. It turns out that if equipped with the right tools, you don't even have to try that hard to achieve that realism, as the tools will partially do it for you. In fact, four secrets to realistic drawing are having the right tools, an accurate outline, a broad-minded examination of light, whatever that means, and finally, simplicity. Before actually getting to the act of drawing the face, it's important to gather the right set of tools because, again, those tools can carry the artist a long, long way along the path to achieving realism. Every portrait starts with a surface and a medium. That can be charcoal, graphite, pastels, you name it. Here, though, we'll focus on the graphite pencil portrait. Graphite powder is an excellent way to establish even tones, even layers of medium with little to no effort. You can apply it with a paintbrush or a cotton swab, and it turns out that that same cotton swab is an excellent blender along with the blending stump. To avoid a monotone feel, you can use a set of pencils of different grades, H, HB, 2B, 6B. Also, you can use a kneaded eraser, which you can shape and reshape to see as you see fit. The thin eraser is brilliant at establishing, at creating the illusion of hairlines and of skin pores. So, there you have it, the tools you need to draw a realistic portrait. Graphite powder, paintbrush, a cotton swab, blending stumps, a set of pencils of different grades, a kneaded eraser, and a thin eraser. With the essential tools instituted, let's jump into the actual steps of drawing a realistic portrait. And my second secret was an accurate outline. For those of us with the artistic skills stretching no further than the mere, but still remarkable completion of an adult or child coloring book, the process of creating a realistic portrait can be very simply summarized. Or to be more specific, in reality, the actual process of drawing a realistic portrait isn't far different from these massively abbreviated guides. The first step is to draw an outline as accurately as possible, and the second step is to fill in the features. So, let's zoom in on the first step. The outline is crucial because it provides the guideline for every subsequent step in the drawing process. It acts as both the map and the GPS, and it's pretty straightforward. You have your reference image, and your goal is to copy the outline of the head, the facial features, and the global tones as best you can. It turns out that our brains tend to process information in whole rather than in individual components, which is why, when you look at this image, you'll group the three shapes together, filling in imaginary lines to shape a triangle. So drawing an outline shouldn't be so hard, right? We're predisposed to seeing lines even when there are none. Overlooking the importance of the outline leads to what I refer to as death by deformation. You wouldn't want to draw a portrait for a loved one only to fall victim to this hex and put them in the uncomfortable position of telling you how brilliant your work is. Fortunately, there are many ways to avoid this, the most common being through the use of a grid system where the outline is built one square at a time. Worst-case scenario, trace. If anyone's ever told you that that's cheating, it's not. It's convenient. After the outline has been drawn as accurately as possible, the features are filled in one by one. The way that I go about drawing a portrait is I start with the left side, and that's because I'm right-handed, and we'll draw the eye first, then go to the cheeks and the forehead, then the ear, and as I make my way down, the paper. I do the same on the other side, filling in the nose and the mouth on the way down. To remind you of the third secret, it was a broad-minded examination of light. So what does that mean? Well, the way that we see and the way that our brains interpret what we see is purely based on light. As light hits our eyes from every angle, it's transduced into an electrical signal that travels all the way to the back of our brains where its position, angle, and intensity are deciphered. So in reality, replicating reality should just be an imitation of how light spatters across the subject of your photograph, rather than just a drawing of two eyes, a nose, a mouth, and two ears. This tenet must be fully swallowed and digested in order to achieve any sort of good result and avoid the perils of frustration. I have this fascination with the nose and how light spills over the nasal bone because it differs so much from person to person. But to give you an example, when you draw the nose, do forget that it's made up of bones and cartilage and tissues. Instead, focus on identifying the different global tones. These are the light, the half tones, and the shadows, and how they relate to each other in the overall picture of your portrait. Remind yourself as you do this that simplicity is key. You don't want to be looking for every tone you can find because by definition, that's humanly impossible. So we've gone over the four secrets. Those were having the right tools, an accurate outline, a broad examination of light, and finally, simplicity. Ta-da! In the end, you might ask yourself, what is the point of drawing portraits? And I could go on and on about the positive impact it can have on your life, but that would take forever, and I think that the following quotes summarize it pretty well for me. Every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not the sitter. Painting is just another way of keeping a diary. You can learn a whole lot about yourself through the art of portraiture. Your strengths and weaknesses, selflessness or self-interest, initiative or apathy. You can also learn a whole lot about your subject. I feel as though I haven't seen a subject until I actually start painting it. Art is a collaboration across societies, across different cultures. It's a powerful tool for communication, even if for you that just means showing your loved ones that you love them, and other people around you that you care. Should you choose to undertake the fascinating art of portraiture, I should leave you with one final tip. In the words of Salvador Dali, have no fear of perfection, you'll never reach it. Thank you.