How to Draw, Learning from Leonardo da Vinci, Realistic Portrait of a Young Woman

Start out with the woman with her head turned to the side. It was a study for a painting. I believe this is a study for the Madonna of the Rocks. So I'll just show you the image right now. And I love this drawing. And there's so much that we can do. Like, when we learn to copy from the masters that came before us, you don't even know it, but you get them, you get their philosophy inside of you. In the same way, if there are any musicians, you can copy the playing of, like, musicians who came before you, and then you get their music into you, and then it can come out in your own way. So we're going to jump over, and we're going to start with a real basic outline of, like, the broad shapes. So for the... One of the things you always see me do is I'll start out with, like, very, very abstract, broad shapes like so. And by starting out, like, I'm really just getting my whole entire hand and arm moving. I'm not doing those tiny little marks like that, but I'm moving all of my arm. And I show you guys this all the time. It's about moving even from, like... You can even move, like, with your back, and you can move into a drawing. In the beginning, you want to be loose and nice and open, and none of this small, little, like, tight kind of stuff. So we have right here, that will be... More or less, that will be, like, her face. And I can guarantee you, I will be moving a lot of these shapes around. I will not be static here because I can't really figure out a drawing until, like, I start to get more information down. So I'll be erasing things, I'll be moving stuff. So you could say, like, Hey, Mr. Macklemore, I can't see your drawing. I can't really even see my drawing either. That's okay, because I'm not trying to get these, like, heavy lines, but I'm trying to get the broadest possible idea. So as I start... As the thing, in a hazy way, starts to take shape, then I do start to go like this, and I'll just land one or two lines that are somewhat of an anchor. So I think some of the lines that are easy to find are, like, the side of the face, the side of the nose, like that, and the eyebrows. And if you remember from previous classes that we had, we talked about the canon of proportions, where you can figure out... I'll grab another little piece of paper. The canon of proportions says that there is pretty much, like, there's one huge... There's one big circle right here, and we're gonna break this up into thirds, like so. So actually, yeah, we'll do it this way. And then there's another circle that's, like, half the size of it. It comes down like that. So again, this is the canon of proportions. So big circle on top, smaller circle that comes about halfway up this overall length. And then the eye socket kind of sits, like, a third of the way down right here. So you can see that in this drawing from a previous class that I did with you guys. So right here, you can say, well, how does that have bearing? Well, you can kind of think of a big circle being up here for the upper part of the head, and then a smaller circle for, like, let's say the jaw area and things of that sort. And then a third of the way down, roughly, is the eyebrow line. And so Da Vinci's more or less, like, on with that. So that looks, like, pretty, you know, more or less accurate for Da Vinci's proportions here. And again, I'll be shifting everything. I have my eraser ready to go so that I can change all of these shapes as I need to. Beneath that, I have the mouth just a little bit. And again, notice how there's nothing concrete, nothing precise going on here. I do my very best to stave off the temptation to get really specific, and that wasn't always the case. When I was a younger man, I would draw a perfect, perfect, perfect nose and, like, fully finish it, let's say. And then after doing a perfect nose, I'd try to find the eye. But as I grew as an artist, I came to understand you kind of make your way around the whole entire drawing. You bounce around a lot, and you figure out where things land by triangulating them. Like, you say, okay, well, I can figure out where the top of the eyebrow goes, but I can't figure out, like, let's say, the inner working of the eye right here. So if I can find the top of the eyebrow, I'm good to go. And if I can find, like, a guess for the eyelid, that's, like, a guess for the eyelid right there. I can find the top of the eyebrow area right here. I can find, like, let's say the... this part of the eyelid right here. So it's the lower part of the upper eyelid. So this is the upper part of our upper eyelid. It would be the lower part of the eyelid. That's a nice, like, anchor that you can, like, land on right there. So I'll find that. And again, it's always just, like, these anchor points that are, like, very... they're visually stark, and they just really pop out. All right, so here is the mouth, like so. And I'm going to ignore the upper lip. I'm just going to put in an indication of the lower lip right there. And so with this, hopefully you're already starting to see, like, very, very vaguely proportions, like a face, like, started to emerge out of these, like, very crude proportions. So now I'm going to jump from the cheek. I'm going to take a guess at where the chin might land. And the jaw turns like so. I'm going to jump over to the hair and see if I can figure out perhaps where the hair might generally land. Going back, I feel like maybe I made the forehead come out a little bit too far, so I'm just going to bring that in. That's where I keep the eraser on me. Now I'm going to start looking at, like, far-off things, like, let's say the top of the head right here. She has, like, some kind of a hairband, some kind of, like, a headdress, I should say. Now I'm going to go from there, and I'm going to shoot down to the neck, try to figure out where the neck roughly lands. And then here is the front of the upper chest right here. And if you want, you can, like, measure down, and it's roughly the size of the head is right about the length of the body right here. And if you take a look from the front of her nose, you draw a line down straight, the body comes out beyond it. So my body right here ends too soon, and it should come a little bit further out, like that. So there's a concept in drawing that's really important, and again, this is why we do old master copies, where have you guys ever shot, like, anything, like, with, like, a gun that has, like, a crosshair or something like that? Like, they have it with bow and arrows, BB guns, different things of that sort. So when you have a hunter's crosshairs, they're literal verticals and horizontals, and then you use that to figure out where something is, right? So the hunter's crosshairs is actually an important concept in art as well, because when you, in your mind's eye, can literally drop a line down from something, then you can figure out if the thing is to the left and to the right of it. So you can say, like, doesn't quite make sense. Can you give us an example? And I will, just right there, where the tip of her nose meets, like, the front of her body, the front of her body is a little bit just beyond it. So it's as if I have the hunter crosshairs of true vertical running, and I can move that anywhere that I want to. So, like, let's say I want to know where the neck begins. Let's say, okay, in order to know where the neck begins, I need to know where the eye is. And so I'm like, okay, well, the eye, now I need to catch, I need to figure out where that eye sits. The eye is beyond the nostril, the flared nostril of her nose right here. So, long story short, we got to find the width of the nose, and then we go up vertically with the hunter's crosshair, and then we say, okay, the tear duct is right at the width of the, at the end of the flare of the nostrils. So we say, okay, so I can find this right here, and that means that I can find the tear duct right over here. And if you can find the tear duct, then you can lock in the eyeball. So there's the eyelid right there, the lower part, and then here's the upper part of the eyelid right here. And now that I am starting to figure out where that eye sits, now I can say, hmm, I think that the retina for her eye is roughly right here. And again, this all came from finding the wing of the nostril right here. And now I say the neck is right below the eyeball, right below the retina of the eye. And so everything is connected, and you can see that when you draw. So I'm going to repeat everything again so you guys, if you feel a little bit lost. I used the wing of the nostril right here, and I went up straight, and then I found the tear duct of the eyeball. And once I found the tear duct of the eye, then I was able to more or less like figure out the size of the eye. Like I'm definitely going to be erasing things. So if you are drawing right now and you're like, oh my goodness, this is so confusing. I feel like I need to erase. I'll be right there with you. I'll be erasing too. So roughly I found the size of the eye, and then I could find, hey, the neck sits right at the base of the eye right there. And that is how I found the neck. So, okay, so I've locked in this moment pretty well over here. Now I'm going to find the bottom of the nose. So the bottom of the nose, we can sum it up as being pretty straight, just like so. And then we have this gentle turn for the tip of the nose right here. And then we're going to go up that straight run, which now I can see that I have a little bit of a problem in that maybe I made this space too wide right here. Maybe I made the nose a little bit too long. So as I promised that I was going to be erasing a lot, I'm going to take a guess and say I should probably move this in just a little bit more, just like that. So what I want you guys to see in this drawing is we just used the nose to lock in a whole lot of stuff. We used the nose to find the inside of the eye right here. We used the nose to find after the eye we found the neck. Now we're going to use the nose to find the far eyeball. So I went up and then I turned. And now what I'm going to do is I'm going to find right within the turn of the eyeball right here, I'm going to find the upper eyelid. And who knows? Maybe that's a good shape. I'm not entirely sure. But I want to show you the hunter's crosshairs again. So if you look at her far eye, so I'm going to zoom in on her face right here so that you can see that even a little bit better. One of the things you'll notice is that this eye on the right-hand side, our right-hand side, is lower than the eye over here. And you can check it out with your hunter's crosshairs because you can run a left-to-right line and say, oh, that eyeball sits below this one. If I hold up a line perfectly horizontal, that eye sits below this one. This one's a little bit higher. So that really is a very helpful thing where you can gauge where things might sit. And so I'm going to jump back to my other pencil. And I'm going to just try to find that upper eyelid right here. So there's a great art teacher. His name is Robert Beverly Hale. And he has a drawing book that really influenced me when I was young. And it's called Drawing Lessons of the Great Masters. And in that book, he talks about how each of us as artists have to develop our own hunter's crosshairs. We have to literally see it in our eye. OK, so I have that turning right there. I brought the cheek in a little bit more. It was feeling a little bit big. And now I think that the tip of the nose right here, I think it's a little bit too far away from the side of the face. And so again, let's zoom in on her face right here and check out how the side of her face comes in just a little bit more. So my early guess was incorrect. I thought it was all the way out pretty far. And so I'm bringing it in. And who knows, maybe that's better. Oftentimes, I move stuff a lot. So I move the side of the face. And I go, da-da-da, da-da-da, da-da-da, until I actually find it. All right, so let's try to work a little bit more on this upper eyelid right here. So I'm going to just turn the shape of that eye a little bit right here. And I think it's pretty important to for a moment just kind of pause and say, everything that you've learned for me so far in terms of a sphere. And then what we talked about often was, OK, if you can create a sphere, well, then can you take that sphere and put it inside of a bigger, like, half sphere? And that's kind of like taking an egg and putting it inside of an egg cup. And you could say, OK, what does that have to do with an eyeball? Well, in a way, an egg sitting in an egg cup on top of a table is kind of like a human eyeball. It's almost like your eye is a sphere, and it's inside of a bigger sphere, which is your eyelid, right? So it's a good way of thinking of it. And that's what I think Da Vinci did here. And so it's a sphere. You can feel the shape of it. And then within it, it's within the larger sphere of the eyelid. And I would never claim to say, like, this is how Leonardo da Vinci did it. I have no clue. But these are my best guesses. Because it feels that way when I look at his work. And when I was in my early 20s, I was pretty lucky. I lived in Italy for a few years. And I was able to actually travel to an area, one moment, called Bologna. And Bologna was so cool because in Bologna, they have this amazing museum. And the museum, I'm just sharpening my pencil up here. The museum was called, well, I'll fast forward and just say this. They had an exhibition, and the exhibition was all on Leonardo da Vinci's drawings. They had a bunch of his drawings. And so I was able to see original sketches by Leonardo da Vinci from his journals in person. It was so cool. And I was struck by how he used these ideas of, like, geometric essence in his drawings. All right, so now I am going to jump. I feel decent, like, not so, like, great about the eyes. Like, oh, like, I got them perfectly. I feel decent. And so now I'm going to put in the lower eyelid, like so. And I'm going to jump down further in the face. And I'm going to go, like, let's say to the, I'm going to go to the lips. And maybe I'm going to bring the side of the face out just a little bit more right here. And then I will go, I'll take my hunter's crosshairs, and from the moment right here in the eye, the bridge of the nose right here, I'm going to drop a line down. Again, that hunter's crosshair is a pure vertical. And I can see that the lip more or less starts right around there. And so I'm just going to bring that down. And then I think of the lips as Leonardo has drawn them. They almost feel like, they almost feel like a little bow and arrow. So sometimes a way of thinking of lips is that they can almost be like these, like this bow and arrow. See that right there, how that's almost like you put your hand right here and you shoot the bow and arrow this way. So it's this gentle turn like that, except turned at this angle. And so as I look at the lips right now, I think that they have this, like, gentle turn to them. I can see that I got so caught up in that illustration, that shape, that I did it totally wrong in that the middle of the lips, they fall right in the middle of the nose. So if you come down right here, sometimes if you're ever working on a drawing, feel your own face. And so take your finger and actually feel the shapes. And the middle of your nose, you have this little divot right here. And that little divot is always right in the middle of your nose. So if you turn your head, it still is going to be placed right beneath the nose. When I just drew the lips, I was so focused on the shape that I forgot, oh, you got to put the divot in the right spot beneath the nose. And so that is the divot right here. And it turns, and it's almost like that bow and arrow. It comes out a little bit. Now, when I do the hunter's crosshairs, let's zoom in on the face even more. I can see that the corner of the mouth kind of hits almost to the pupil of the eye right here, to the retina of the eye. So it's like the corner of the mouth comes all the way over this far. And then you go up, and it should sit like roughly right around there. Then I'm going to find the bottom of the lips right here. And then there's the beginning of the chin. So you can see with the face that I've done so far, you can see that I don't have enough room for the chin. So I have to ask myself, well, do the lips need to come up higher or does the chin need to come down lower? If the chin comes down lower, then that might make the forehead and stuff feel too small. So I have a dance to do right now. Something's wrong with my drawing. And sometimes when young art students encounter this, they're like, my drawing's wrong. And then they start freaking out, and they're like, oh, I hate it. And there's plenty of frustration. And sometimes you want to take the pad and just close it and just go do something else. But if you embrace the mindset that everything you're working on is like wet clay, and the sculpture that you're working on, the shapes aren't working at the moment. And so you just have to move the clay around a little bit. So I'm going to move the clay around a little bit. I'm going to try to find maybe where I think the chin might be as I look at all the shapes. So maybe it comes like right around here. And then I'm going to go to the top of the head. Now the face is feeling too big for the whole entire skull. So maybe I need to just nudge the drawing up a hair over here. And now this isn't feeling so squished. So I hope as we're working on this drawing that you see how much I'm constantly adapting my drawings to get the right proportions. Okay, so now the corner of the eye is feeling too close to this hair. It's really way too tight. So I'm just going to go like this. I'll erase away a little bit, and I'll move it over. So when I draw, I have my eraser in my left hand, my pencil in my right hand, and I am working constantly with my eraser and my pencil together. So, okay, now let's get to roughly the eye. I'm sorry, the eye socket. There's a way of working on this drawing where you could have done the eye socket first. So I'm just going to shade in roughly the underside of the eye socket. So if the light is coming from like, let's say like right here from this direction, then the eye socket is not going to receive any of that light, so that's going to be in shade. You can even clean up a little bit if you want and then shade it in. So there you have it. Then we're going to get, let's start putting in a little bit of shade on the side of the nose. All of this is going to get rethought. I'm just trying to see what my big shapes look like and see if they're any good. And I feel pretty decent. Like, they're not like so good. They're not so bad. Now, I am going to have one problem copying Leonardo da Vinci's drawing, and this is the problem right here. Leonardo da Vinci was left-handed. Left-handed artists, we, I'm a right-handed artist, but left-handed artists, when they make a stroke, they make a stroke in this direction. That's the natural way that a left-handed artist's hand wants to go. A right-handed artist, your stroke goes in the exact opposite direction. So all of Leonardo da Vinci's drawings, the slash marks go this way. And I'm right-handed, and it's going to be really difficult for me to try to do left-handed strokes, so I'm going to repurpose his drawing maybe. Like, I don't know. Maybe I'll try to do a left-handed stroke with my right hand. But let's go over to the face, and I can show you his left-handed strokes. And you know what? Let's jump over to the screen itself, and there are all the strokes going in that direction. So as you work in your drawing, you have a choice to make. You say, okay, am I going to simulate, you know, his strokes at this angle right here, which we can, or am I going to do the strokes at the angle that I want to go at right here? Again, I don't know the answer to these things. I just am aware of them, and then I'll play with them as I get there. So I'm happy with the broad shapes everywhere here. I don't really need to go much further over here. I don't need to do much more in terms of, like, let's say the body and things of that sort. I might indicate, like, the end of her hair right here. I might indicate the headband, the head wrap, whatever this thing is. That needs to move over as the head got bigger. So I'm going to move that over here. The top of the head needs to come up higher in my drawing. And now what I'm going to do is I'm going to grab, like, let's say a large blending stump like this. So I'll take that blending stump. And what I'll do is I'll start to just ghost in some of the areas of the drawing that I know are going to be in shade to see how the broad general shapes of my drawing looks. I don't think that Leonardo da Vinci did this in his drawing. I'm doing it, but it doesn't seem to me like he necessarily did this. The underside of the nose has a deep dark right here. The underside of the eye socket, we can blend that and kind of, like, unify it. I'll even shade it a little bit in the direction that he shaded. But this is just to get an idea. It's how I work. I use this to see the shapes. When you put in these big masses, things start becoming a little bit more clear. And now you can see I have a little bit of graphite on the blending stump already. So what you can do is you can use a blending stump sometimes to draw in a certain area. You're not even just doing big blending, but you use it to, like, draw in a big area. And I can see that, in my opinion, I landed the lips maybe a little bit too low or maybe the nose a little bit too high. Something's not right here, and it's not something that's such a big problem. But also the other thing I can see is if your drawing's ever not going in a direction that you necessarily want it to. So this drawing of this beautiful young girl, young woman, she has a pleasant curl at the corner of her lips. And I see that James says, mine looks like the Mona Lisa. So, like, yes, our drawings will go a totally different direction. It does look like the Mona Lisa. So when you have that happen, and, like, let's say my drawing, my drawing, she looks miserable. Take a look at it. She just looks like she's, like, having a bad day. And so I'm like, hey, okay, like, I'm trying my best here. And if someone's having a bad day and they look miserable, what happens to the corner of their mouths? Like, literally, you can take your fingers, put it on your face, and just go, you know, like, oh, she's got a mug on her face because this corner of her mouth is too low. And stuff like this, like, makes me laugh in drawing because I'm like, oh, it's actually pretty natural. I made her, I gave her, like, a sad face. Like, anyone who knows how to draw, like, an emoji, like, of a sad face knows that the corner of her mouth just simply came too low. So I'll just take that and I'll bring it up a little higher just like that. And, you know, maybe it's gone a little bit of a better direction just like that. And if I look at the drawing and I'll zoom in on the lips right here, I do think that the lips go a little bit more horizontal and I had it tilted down too low. So now I'll go back in and I'll see if I can raise up the lips right here. It comes up higher and it lifts up at the corner right here. Now, da Vinci is the most, one of the most subtle artists in the history of art. So I don't presume that I'm going to capture this beautiful, soft, you know, half, I don't even know if the word is smile, but I don't even think I'm going to be able to capture it. But at least it's going a little bit of a better direction. She doesn't seem so miserable now because you can feel that gentle, gentle uplift right there. So back to the, let's go back to the eyes. So I'm going to look at her eyes up close like that and I'm just going to lock in right here, the pupil. So Leonardo da Vinci in his journals, I gave a lecture on this last week for an hour and a half and I gave a lecture on Leonardo da Vinci. It was a part one, part two lecture and that was a month before that. But he correctly identified that the pupils of our eyes are apertures and they open and they close right according to how much light is shining at them. The one thing you might find interesting is in this drawing, the pupil of this eye right here is pretty wide open and dilated pretty wide. The pupil in this eye is much smaller. And so some authors, some art historians have speculated that that might be because as an artist who's capturing two different moments in time and that he loved to like display motion. I don't know. I'm not saying that they're wrong, but I don't really know why this pupil is so tiny and that one's so big. But there you have it. They are pretty different. And I think he was too smart and too good an artist to do anything like that on accident. And I can see now that the upper eyelid, if you look at my whole entire drawing, my eyelid right here is too small and it needs to come out wider. So it's not a big deal. I just go like this. I just bring it a little bit wider like that. So I'm going to go a little bit heavier. If the light source is coming from here, then that upper eyelid is casting a shadow on her eye right here. And so this is going to be somewhat in shade. And then the tear duct over here is much more in shade. And I'm going to wrap up with the nose. I can see that the nose that I've drawn, it's too small and it's too much of like a little pin. I think her nose actually has a little bit more mass to it. And so I'm going to just bring the nose out just a little bit more over here. And it's just going to come out just a little bit further. And if you look at her nose in the drawing, I think that Leonardo da Vinci, he kind of jumped around looking for where the edge of that nose might be. And so I love that the artists that I look at, when you really start studying them, they're pretty human. And they themselves, as they worked on their drawings, they're trying to figure out, again, look at the tip of the nose in da Vinci's drawing. See how there are several tips of the nose there? So if you look at that and you see how da Vinci was hopping around trying to find that, it makes you feel a little bit better if your name is Kevin McEvoy. And, you know, 500 years after this drawing was done, you're having difficulty finding the tip of the nose. You're like, well, so did da Vinci. So it makes you feel a little bit better.