Portrait art is primarily consists of painting, drawing and photography. Photography is more of a combination of technical know-how on the equipments and one’s creativity in composition.

Drawing is the often describe as the most fundamental, and portrait painting is much more difficult to acquire.

In a concise explanation, I feel that portrait art attribute to a common purpose.. that is, achieving the goal of capturing likeness to the actual person in life.

Cameras can capture likeness easily, but a real portrait painting requires patience and good understanding, and an eye for creativity composition that might come through the brush or pencil.

Since my last post on portrait drawing, I still cannot figure out what is the best practice to accomplish a good portrait art, specifically on paintings and drawings.

Is there any secrets to achieve good portrait painting?

Is techniques or choice of medium contribute to the best learning method?

Or practice makes perfect?

Below sharing some tips for best practices on learning basic portrait drawing and paintings. I do hope there will be useful for every beginners in portrait art.

1. Always keep a small sketch book and start drawing from life subject. This is so simple, isn’t it? Well, I hardly do that when it comes to real practice in public places. I did bring along 2 sketch books in this traveling trip, however, I use it more often as a jotter book than to seriously learn drawings on life subjects.
2. Drawing from life helps to learn how to analyze reality and put it on the page. Its time to change and seriously put in some effort to draw more. Portrait outlines are the basic, the important aspect to describe its form is by determining the light and shade. Analyze and emphasize on light source for shadows and darkness.
3. Do not rush to finish the portrait art, but given ample time for detailed observation. Eventually, what is drawn or painted is translated through your brain. Focus on proportion of drawing a typical adult head. Or perhaps, start drawing basic shape on portrait features, such as nose, ears, mouth. Eyes are very difficult to draw, I hope to have more practice on this area.
4. Learn through trial and errors. “Experience is the best teacher”. Its an old sayings.. “learn from mistakes”, “never too old to learn”, and “learning never ends”. Accuracy is important. Drawing off by the slightest bit just won’t look right. Using grids as an aid helps to minimized errors and more accurate drawings.
5. Drawing is the most fundamental. Capturing the essence of the subject is far more crucial to a powerful and successful portrait than mere details, medium, and techniques. Painting is much more difficult, you have to know what color you are seeing when you’re painting. For drawing portrait, the right shading and proportionality help to determine the value and likeness, respectively. Hue and color in painting comes latter.
6. Study of body anatomy; understand what bones and muscles are behind the skin, how big they are, what their shape is. Do you know even the great master artist, Vincent van Gogh, painted a human skull and skeleton in an anatomy class while he was studying art?

There is no shortcuts for learning portrait drawing or paintings. Will I practice hard on what I have preached?  We shall see next week post..

Portrait drawings using grid system has made much simpler. Below illustrated my work from a photographic source, using pencil as the medium. This digital photograph is a profile portrait from a friend in my Facebook. She has given me an opportunity to demonstrate on previous blog: Why Portrait Drawing Using Grid Lines is The Best Practice?.

As you can see in the illustration of a profile portrait, it is probably an easier choice. Most of the attention is focused on the outline of the face. In addition, it made any students to have some challenge drawing with only single eye exists in the portrait. Ideally, it does help to build confidence in portrait drawing with moderate difficulty.

1. Grid lines are drawn on the photograph using software editing tools, like Photoshop or GIMP. Alternatively, you can print it out and use a fine pen to outline it. I actually draw the portrait direct from the laptop display. Disable the screensaver, otherwise you will be irritated every 5 minutes of your artwork.
2. Since this photograph is 480 x 480 square pixels , what you have to do next is to square up your drawing paper of any size. Mine was 8.5″ x 8.5″. For grid system, a long scaled ruler is the most essential tool. And be reminded to use 2H pencil to draw the grid lines very lightly.
3. Mathematically, size of your material is not a factor, because ratio is applied to scale up your chosen portrait photos to your desired drawings paper. Based on your existing length of drawing paper, divide this dimension by the number of squares appear in the digital photograph. If digital photo showing 10-squares grid, make sure you are not using 9-square grid to divide the paper length. I have mine with 8.5″ divide by 5-square grid, resulting per square size of 1.7″. Some grid lines are visible if you look closely.
4. I started my drawings from the profile of the forehead to the chin. And some lines to draft out the hair. Always justify your point of drawing within a small square grid, it doesn’t carry any meaning though. Apparently, drawing the portrait will start to picture clearly with more lines are being filled. With these initial steps, any student will feel more confidence and wanting to continue with drawings using grid system.
5. The eye will demand slightly more attention, since there are the main feature of every portrait drawings.  Having smaller square grids concentrated on this portion may help, however, not too encouraging for a beginner to learn free hand. It also makes the drawing messier

Having describing on how I use grid system for portrait drawing, it will be nice to see feedback on what I have completed.  Perhaps, you may want to contribute your photo portrait artwork in here?

Grid Systems Portrait Drawings

Profile Portrait Drawings

Photo Portrait, Courtesy of Megumi Kubo

Facebook Open Group for Photo Portrait Painting. Free to join and support this group

Similar illustration posted here