How not to draw a portrait

The [tag-tec]human head[/tag-tec] is pretty consistent across the ages, across gender, across race, etc. We’re all human (except those that aren’t) so we all fall within some pretty narrow confines.

Take, for example, the eyes. We all have 2. Okay, we’re all supposed to have 2. You may have heard that the head is “5 eyes” across – and that’s a good rule of thumb, but drawing a portrait from rules of thumb will almost always leave you with a lifeless scribble that you’d rather bury at the bottom of the trash can. Under some stuff.

The point? Don’t draw a portrait based on what you think it should be because your 10th grade art teacher told you it had to be that way. Or because you read some drawing book and it seemed to work for that guy. Well, you’re not that guy. And neither am I.

So how do you do it properly? I’d like to preface a future post – about “cheating” when doing portraits, always a hot topic – by loosely quoting a phenomenal artist, Virgil Elliott, who said that, yes, you can “cheat,” but by not learning to see properly in the first place, you’re just cheating yourself and you’ll never really become a great artist. He said that, or words to that effect, on WetCanvas, when the topic of “cheating” came up for the umpteenth time.

“Properly” drawing a portrait (or painting one, for that matter), involves roughing in based on what you know to be true about proportion and the human head in general with what you actually see. Yes, you have to actually look, examine, re-examine, and maybe even erase and start over a bunch of times.

Drawing a portrait is a lot like tuning an instrument to itself. What I mean by that, for you guitarists out there, is if you don’t happen to have perfect pitch or access to a pitch pipe or tuner, you can adjust one string so that it’s close and then adjust the other strings to that string. Thus, the guitar isn’t at concert pitch but it’s close and it’s in tune with itself so most people (especially me) would never notice the difference.

Extrapolating, if you keep your portrait relative to itself, measuring, re-measuring, erasing, etc., until you’ve captured the nuances, and keep the rules of thumb on the back burner, you’ll actually come out with a really good portrait. I think that this portrait done for a group session on WetCanvas came out very good (though I see all the mistakes every time I look at it) even though I almost completely ignored all the stuff I learned about the head and just told my brain to “shut up and draw.”

More to come on cheating, turning off your brain, learning to see, proportions, and other topics intimated in this post.