The five things you need to be able to draw a portrait

What most people think it takes to be a good portrait artist is to be born gifted, to have the privilege of attending art school for several years, or perhaps to be blessed with a photographic memory and an almost magical ability to transfer that image. to paper Yes, of course, any of those things would do the job well, but none of those requirements are really necessary to become an excellent pencil portraitist. The good news is that you don’t have to be born an artist, but you can easily learn the skills and in a relatively short time it is possible to become very skilled at drawing great portraits.

Initially all you need is a passion and a desire to be able to do it and then an easy to follow step by step structure. The good news is that you don’t have to be born knowing how to draw a portrait, but it’s definitely something you can learn to do easily. So regardless of your current level of drawing skill, you can become an expert portraitist.

Second, you will need to commit to practicing what you learn and be prepared to fail many times along the way before truly satisfying results occur. This is where fear of failure and being a perfectionist can hold you back from success. If you are a bit of a perfectionist, then maybe think about this and ask yourself the question “Do you honestly know any who is perfect. Be honest, he or she doesn’t even exist, so why pursue something that doesn’t even exist? Here’s something else for people struggling with perfectionist traits to consider, it’s not unusual for some people who can only settle for perfection for their innate fear of failure to motivate them to decide to do nothing at all. However, if you don’t enter the race to avoid coming last, even that person who comes last has achieved much more than you! One final message for those of us who would be perfectionists, it’s definitely not bad news to have that attitude, so take heart, the secret is to change the hard and fast rule of trying to be perfectto a new rulealways trying to do your best. That way you can always achieve your goal and it’s a bit of a no-brainer, but how could you do better than your best anyway? Of course, there is nothing stopping you from striving to make it even better in the future.

Third, it is important to have a good understanding of the structure and proportions of the face. It’s amazing how little most of us really notice about the overall design and proportions of a face, considering we look at them every day, maybe even hundreds of them.

And fourth, an insight into the five main components of a face, namely eyes, ears, nose, mouth, and hair. The same is true here as well in terms of the lack of precision and detail that we notice in the individual parts of a face. Although we look at people’s faces every day, we tend to get only a general picture of whoever we’re looking at and many of us would struggle to give a detailed description of our loved ones let alone strangers. It has to do with how the brain works, the right half of the brain that is responsible for images processes information holistically rather than a detailed step-by-step account. As a result, we often see what we expect to see instead of what we are actually seeing. An example of that phenomenon is when I recently shaved off my beard that I had worn for years and some family members didn’t even notice until I pointed it out to them. One response was “I thought there was something different, but I wasn’t sure what it was.” It just proves the point that when we see things holistically, we only fill in the gaps, but not always accurately. Being aware of this phenomenon means that we need to focus much more on our observations when learning how to draw a portrait.

Finally, the glue that ties all of this together and brings your drawings to life is “shading“Thus creating a three-dimensional result and bringing everything to life. Shading isn’t something that comes naturally to most of us, but it’s certainly a simple skill that can be learned.