Learn to Draw People Quickly & Accurately

For many aspiring artists, drawing people accurately can be their greatest challenge. It’s comparatively easy to draw a house, tree, or animal, but drawing a human face comes with the pre-requisite of making it look like someone. And it can be hard to get the ‘likeness’. Likeness is the quality of the drawing that enables it to resemble the person being sketched.

There are three fundamental concepts that need to be understood and taken care of while sketching people:

• Proportion and perspective

• Line and Contour

• Shading and Tone

Drawing Eyes

It will be easier to draw eyes in profile, because you will only need to draw one! In fact, an eye in profile can be drawn with just three lines: the eyeball, the upper lid, and the lower lid. Note that the eyeball should not be kept flat, and the upper lid sticks out more than the lower lid. Since you are drawing lashes from the side, they look like one big lash. So, don’t draw individual lines for the lashes, draw clumped ones instead.

Drawing Hair

It is important to ensure that the skull is drawn in correct proportion and the ears are accurately placed. When you need to draw short hair, start by drawing in the darkest areas. You should move your pencil strokes opposite to the direction of growth, leaving some space where there are lighter hairs. When you need to draw longer hair, follow the same technique and make longer strokes. You may use a harder pencil to differentiate between the light and dark hair. Leave highlights clearly. You may also want to use an eraser to pick out highlights.

OK, those tips should help you learn how to make portraits. Drawing people is not as hard as you may think! Just practice and you will improve. However, if you’d like to accelerate your learning process or develop your skills to a professional level, you should get expert instruction. For drawing people, here is what we currently recommend: The ABC of Art Skills.

The ABC of Art Skills, taught by Jenni Gibson, is a simple, yet comprehensive, drawing program that promises to have you creating beautiful drawings right away, even if right now you can barely sketch a stick figure.

Many of Gibson’s students have submitted positive testimonials over the years about The ABC of Art Skills. It’s a fun and inexpensive program that flat out works.