How to Draw a Portrait 🎨

My Learning Plan

The biggest challenge in drawing portraits arrives from the misconception of how art is created – students draw not what they know, but copy what they see. This leads to inevitable mistakes.

To explain why the principle “Draw What You Know, not What You See” is important, I’ll give you an example. When drawing from life, art students are doing their best to depict eyes, nose and mouth as they see it on a model, forgetting, however, the overall construction of the head. It is like decorating walls before building a house.

To “build” a head in portrait drawing requires much more than simply copying what you see. And the necessary know-how only comes with crucial knowledge. You simply won’t see the correctness of proportions if you don’t know what those proportions are.