I know many beginning artists who want to start right from scratch and draw a portrait of someone they know or someone popular. Drawing great portraits is like the holy grail of drawing. Creating realistic and living portraits needs a high skill level near to mastery. Fortunately you can learn these skills much easier, if you learn them separately.

The first step is learning to draw different features of the human face. By separating single features and drawing them separately you can learn faster. You’ll concentrate on perfecting one feature at a time. So you improve your understanding and knowledge of the details. Fill several sheets of paper with eyes, noses etc and you will get a feeling how they look and how to draw them. But don’t draw to small. Two eyes, mouths or noses on one sheet (letter or A4 sized). That leaves you enough space for details.

The next step means putting together all you have learned when drawing the features one at a time. You have to place the facial features in correct proportions, distances and layout so they fit together and the big picture makes sense. So what is the correct layout? There are a few rules that help you to place the features on the right positions:

* The eyes are located halfway between the top of the head and the chin. This is one of the most important lessons to learn when drawing portraits. Many (me, too) tend to place the eyes too high, so the portrait gets a flat forehead. It seems to be some optical illusion that makes us think the eyes are placed higher than they are.
* Another problem with the eyes is their positioning to the left and the right. Between them there should be enough space for exactly one more eye. The same to the left and right – between the eyes and the border of the face is enough space for one more eye. All in all in a human face has enough space for five eyes in a row (although this would look a bit strange).
* As we are placing so many eyes into one face, let’s add two more. This time they help us to place the eyebrows where they belong. The distance between the eyebrows and the eyes is equal to the eyes’ height
* Then the bottom of the nose can be found halfway between the eyes and the chin
* Halfway between chin and nose is the mouth
* The mouth’s corners can be found below the center of the eyes. But this can differ a lot as there are many people with wider or narrower mouths
* The ears’ top starts where the eyebrows are and their bottom may line up with the bottom of the nose. But these measures can vary as people have a wide variety of differently sized and shaped ears.

Using these rules you should be able to position the facial features correctly. But always keep in mind: these measures and positions are idealized! In reality these measures will differ slightly. That is what makes up the personality of a human face.

And that’s what the most important skill for portrait drawing is about. You have to master this third skill to draw portraits that resemble the original model. Each human face has its personality and looks special. There are two reasons for this:

* First the facial features itself differ slightly by shape, color or size (for example broad vs. narrow noses, thick vs. thin lips, etc.)
* Second, the layout of the facial features differs slightly from the idealized measures I showed you before. The eyes can stand a little bit narrower, the chin may be stronger or weaker. Finally this changes the overall layout of the face and gives it personality and uniqueness.

The key for drawing resembling and live like portraits is to capture these slight differences and bring them to paper. This needs much practice and a trained eye. But the more portraits you draw the better you will learn how to draw portraits and the more resembling your portraits will look.

So what are you waiting for? Start drawing portraits!

Drawing and sketching people is an invaluable way of developing a wide range of artistic skills. I’ve been drawing people for very many years – family, friends, people in cafes and restaurants, life class models – and other artists. People often tell me how much they like the sketches I make of people I come across on my travels with a sketchbook – which I find a bit odd as most rarely have faces!

Anyway, I’ve decided the time has come to write a bit more about sketching people. So this blog post is about 10 tips on how to sketch people – or at least my understanding of how I sketch people.

First some basics – then the top tips.

The basics come from Sketching for Real – Introduction. The sketches throughout the post include some which have been posted on this blog before and some which are new to the blog.

What is a sketch?

A sketch, in art terms, can be:

• a way of practising and refining your skills in drawing and mark marking
• an exploratory drawing – exploring how something works/might work
• a quick drawing – e.g. sketching in public tends to be time-limited rather than open-ended
• a rough description – it’s OK if they lack detail; don’t fill the page or are not even completed
• a record of something you’ve seen
• a record of one or more aspects of something you want to develop into a painting e.g. a colour study
• a preliminary study – for a later painting (done before you start to check how your painting will work rather than as an underdrawing on your final support)

A sketch may be an imaginative or a creative interpretation of reference material – but it does notinvolve meticulous copying of a reference photo.

Very often a sketch is a study of a subject that the artist can see – and consequently involves working and drawing from life.

Why sketch?

Sketching broadens and enhances your basic skill base.

As you practice and progress, sketching helps you to:

• Develop your freehand drawing, mark making and observational skills
• Draw something everyday – an exercise which will bring fluency and confidence to your drawing
• Get a better record of the colours and tones you see
• Practice how to crop a scene and compose a picture
• Develop finished artwork without relying totally on a reference photo

So now I’ve identified what a sketch is and why sketching can be a good habit to acquire, we’ll look at the 10 tips for how to sketch people.

10 Tips for How to Sketch People

These tips are NOT of the ‘get rich quick’ variety. They’re essentially principles which make much more sense through application. However the real benefits really only come when they become ingrained habits through lots of practice.

#1. Take a class in life drawing!
This is my #1 top tip because this one tip produces the most benefit in terms of learning how to look, understanding how the human body works and how to draw figurative shapes and values.

#2. Find a place where people linger.
There’s no point in making life difficult for yourself. Sketching people who are settled or who move only a little or slowly makes sketching people a lot easier.

Here are some suggestions:

• cafes, bars and restaurants,
• waiting rooms of any kind
• train stations and airports
• art galleries
• people watching an event
• parks and places where people sit in the sun
• artists sketching/drawing/painting plein air or in studios

# 3. People ALWAYS move – so learn to draw FAST!
There’s no way of getting round this one! Also learn to be philosophical about the fact that you’ll have a lot of “starts” which don’t go anywhere in your sketchbook. My rule of thumb is I lose about 25% of the sketches I start – and I draw very fast!

#4. Sit in one place and construct a scene
So – you’ve accepted that people will come and go so and you’ve learned how to sketch quickly. You still need a strategy for how to deal with the comings and goings. My own personal strategy is to sit in one place and construct a scene around a pivotal person.

I try and select somebody who looks interesting and as if they might stay still long enough for me to get the bare essentials down – size, shapes, relationship with the background and, in particular, the horizontals and verticals. I then construct the scene around that person as people come and go. They don’t all have to be there at the same time!

Remember you are sketching and not drawing a portrait. I’ve noticed a tendency for people who are starting to sketch to just sketch individuals as isolated objects and for them to ignore the backgrounds and context altogether. The next three tips are about addressing this.

#5. Draw shapes and values not detail

Squint to see values. Start by working out the rough size and shape of the big shapes that you can see – in value terms. You can then work within these – again using value shapes. Using line to describe the edge of some aspect of detail can then be surprisingly effective if most of the drawing is value shapes due to the contrast between the two. I always enjoy sketching the ‘squiggley’ bits of folds in clothing.

#6. Make connections.
Here are some of the connections you can make

• look for connections between people in terms of relationships and body language
• identify the big shape that is the group of people. If you can’t see an edge then don’t draw it.
• join up shapes which are the same value e.g. connect shapes associated with an individual to the background if they are the same value
• make the connections between different zones more obvious. Overlap figures and objects to demonstrate who is in the foreground, the middle ground and background.

#7. Remember proportions
Use the background to help with scale. Sight size and measure proportions accurately if you have the time If you don’t, then choose one line to act as a baseline for keeping everything in proportion. I always try and find a vertical because I have a tendency to have leaning verticals and it acts as a check.

#8. Seek out repetition.
People who repeat movements are good subjects to draw. You have to work out what the sequence is and how often it repeats. Artists very often make wonderful models for learning how to draw people who are animated as most tend to have a neat and repetitive routine of movements when drawing or painting. The painter in the above sketch had two distinct patterns of movements. I watched for a while and decided which one gave maximum sketching time.
#9. Avoid drawing faces and feet!
If you draw a likeness, then you should really obtain a model release. Practice likenesses with family and people you know rather than with strangers. Squint when you look at faces and then only draw what you can see – which will be values. You’ll be surprised at how little detail there is.

Feet are often drawn bigger than they actually are. Check the feet in the sketch below – would you have drawn them this small?

#10. This is not an exercise in portraiture. It’s worth reiterating that you need to remember that you are sketching and not drawing a portrait or trying to be wholly accurate.

Think of yourself as a visual journalist, there to record what you see – when you squint! Be discriminating – you don’t need to draw everything. A lot of people’s sketches are not complete.

If you get a good vantage point, try drawing lots of little people on one sheet of paper. Drawing small is always interesting as you have to work out what are the important characteristics to keep which mean they don’t all look like stick men or the same. You can also change the colour of clothing to make sketches better!

The Most Important Step of Learning How to Draw People

Fortunately for beginning artists, the journey of a thousand portraits begins with a single simple line: the gesture or “action” line, which shows which direction the body is moving and can be compared to the spine of your subject. In fact, for some artists, the gesture line really is just the location of the spine. Other artists will make the gesture line so long as to encompass the whole body from head to toe, but the general idea is the same.

To practice finding gesture lines:

• Find some reference photos of people in poses you’d like to draw. Practice drawing a single smooth line which goes through most of the pose (see the pictures above for some examples).

• Watch how other people move when you’re at work/school, shopping, etc. Observe how the spine usually stays in a single smooth curve no matter how complex the pose is, and pay attention to how their limbs go with or against the curve of the spine.

• Practice drawing stick figures (cartoon characters, real people – depending on your skill level) starting with a gesture line and branching out to include the head and limbs.