The Art of Portraiture

The biggest challenge in drawing portraits is overcoming the tendency to draw a person as you think they should look like with stylized features and instead rely on perception skills to draw what you see as accurately as observed from the model's proportions and values. This drawing process is often referred to as "Draw what you See, not what you Know." Our brains know what an eye, nose, and mouth looks like and we can draw them from imagination; but when training your artistic eye to measure the face and draw shapes and spaces as they are depicted, the ability to draw realistically becomes more successful with practice over time.

The students in Advanced Art began their Drawing unit by sketching their classmates' portraits prior to instruction. This was a baseline for me to see their ability level going into this class from previous experiences and what skills we needed to work on.

The next step was to teach human facial proportions so that my students could begin to practice sighting and train their eyes to measure with a pencil so that they could determine the width-to-height ratio of their classmate's faces and the spatial relationships of their facial features.

Adult faces, regardless of individual appearances share the same proportion from the distance between the hairline and the bottom edge of the chin divided in three equal parts:

1. Top 1/3 of the face: From the hair-root line to the eyebrow line

2. Middle 1/3 of the face: From the eyebrow line to the base of the nose

3. Bottom 1/3 of the face: From the base of the nose to the bottom of the chin.

I demonstrated sighting from observation by having a student volunteer to be the model while the other students drew her portrait. We started by sketching an oval a little larger than the palm of their hand on an 18 x 24 inch paper for a life-size portrait. I had my students practice measuring her face into thirds and sketch in the guidelines for the main facial features.

When sighting facial proportions, there are a few little tricks that help to accurately portray the model such as measuring the width of the eye and counting how many eyes there are in the width of the face from left to right. You can also draw vertical lines from the edge of the eyes to the mouth and horizontal lines from the top and bottom of the ears to see how close the facial features should be to each other.

I had students draw very lightly as they were continually measuring proportions and finding more accurate spatial relationships of the model before rendering value by shading in pencil.

Drawing realistically is a visual perceptual skill made up of five basic components:

1) Seeing and drawing edges (sometimes called “contour drawing”)

2) Seeing and drawing spaces (called “negative spaces”)

3) Seeing and drawing relationships (called “perspective and proportion”)

4) Seeing and drawing lights and shadows (called “shading”)

5) Seeing and drawing the whole (called the gestalt, the “thing itself,” the essential nature of the observed subject, which emerges spontaneously from the first four component skills)

Practicing these skills trains the eye to see shapes and spaces more accurately to depict them in your artwork. This also builds critical thinking skills, problem solving, intuition, imagination, and creativity. Following our live model sessions, I introduced alternative drawing methods for rendering value using oil pastels, chalk pastels, charcoal, pen & ink, and watercolor.

We also practiced measuring facial proportions in thirds from photographs as well as live models so that my students could have more choice over their subject matter. As they improved with drawing proportions, we worked on adding value while using mixed media. I encouraged my students to take breaks for in-progress critiques so that we could prop up the artworks and stand at a distance to squint our eyes and see where the darkest values should be compared to the model or photo reference.

With all of these techniques progressing in their skill sets, students began preparing their final compositions. They could either draw another student in class or take a photograph of a friend or self converted to black and white so they could see the values.

It was exciting to see my students start the final portraits.

I am proud of the work and motivation my students put into developing their technique and pushing themselves a little more out of their comfort zone. It takes a lot of practice to draw portraits realistically and it can be difficult to establish confidence when comparing the person's "likeness" to your own artwork. It was exciting for me as their teacher to see them apply the foundational drawing skills and expand upon them with their choice of media in each person's unique style.