Advice on drawing portraits by Genie Monday 10 October, 2011
Things that I have learnt about faces and from drawing lots of portraits.
In our minds eye we think that we know what our dearest friends and family look like, but once you put pencil to paper the inaccuracy of our visual memories become apparent. It is almost like we see people from all angles at once in our thoughts, in a way the cubists expressed most accurately what our memories look like, by pulling faces apart and reassembling them in facets from different angles.
I have been trying to draw honest portraits of family, and I have found that due to the sheer size of the portraits, it has been hard for me to neutralize people’s features. It is the closest that I have come to drawing the people that I love accurately.
To all those drawing portraits I can give the following advice:
- Faces are not symmetrical at all, and age takes a huge toll on symmetry.
- Mouths do not have lines around them; they are merely folds of flesh.
- Eyes and mouths are smaller, and noses are generally shorter than you think, however if you do portraits on commission clients will almost always ask you to make the eyes of their child/horse/dog/cat bigger.
- The features of the face are not only defines by the eyes, nose and mouth, spend as much time contemplating the shape of the face and the lines of the rest of the face.
- The lightest point in the face is the highlight in the eye, it is the only thing that is truly white.
- If you are unsure of where to start, start with the line in the middle of the mouth, this is usually the darkest and hardest line in the face and can be reworked later when you are more comfortable if necessary.
To all those wanting to have their portrait drawn, please do so, it is an amazing experience to see how people interpret you. Looking at a photograph of yourself comes with so much predetermined ideas about yourself and what you look like. It is almost a therapeutic process to see what you look like to others and what they capture about you.
