Guides on Learning How to Draw for Beginners
Many people who want to learn to draw will look to books and guides for advice.If
you do an internet search for advice on drawing portraits (or indeed if you buy a book on the subject) you are likely to come across lots of pieces on 'drawing eyes' or 'how to draw mouths' and so on. As a method of improving your drawing, they can have some useful advice but in general I'd advise treating this approach with a certain degree of caution. Instead I'd suggest a more integral approach that teaches you not so much 'what to expect to see' when you look at a face, but rather 'how to look' for yourself. If you can learn to look correctly, you'll find that you won't require a description of all of these features. You can see for yourself.
Certainly some of these guides do have valuable lessons on anatomy that aim to break down common but incorrect assumptions that we often hold. For example, a guide to drawing the mouth might point out that most of us do not have a clearly defined 'line' where our bottom lower lip ends and our regular skin begins (as if the mouth was clearly defined with lipstick) Instead what we have is usually a gentle gradation as the softer, thinner, darker skin of our lips merges with our chins. Sometimes this lip tissue can be particularly diffuse and blends in with the skin below it such that there really isn't much of a discernible line, but an area that appears as pinkish skin that isn't quite lip but isn't quite like the skin below it. This is very useful advice and something people aren't generally aware of unless they have actually looked closely at a lip, therefore suspending preconceived ideas about what lips look like.
However I am rather wary of guides which, for instance, teach you to 'break down' the structure of the face into certain proportions, or break down the drawing of a mouth into a series of instructions on how to draw each of it's component parts. Not that these instructions are necessarily wrong, it's just that they encourage a type of approach to drawing which I think is very unhelpful. That is to approach a face with any received ideas you may have about what you are likely to see there, and to try to apply rules to what you encounter. You may end up overriding the information your eyes are telling you about what you are actually seeing in favour of those ideas.
When drawing a face, I try to forget what I am drawing. As I move between the different features of a face, I aim to forget that I am currently drawing - for example - an eye or a nose. I try to break what I am seeing down into a collection of abstract shapes. This prevents me from making any assumptions at all about what an eye ought to look like! A very good book I recommend to understand this point is Betty Edward's
'Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain'. In this classic book, Edwards explains how the left side of our brains, associated with verbal, analytical reasoning and language (in other words the impulse to categorise and label) can hinder us when we draw by 'jumping in' and telling us what it thinks we should be seeing. This discourages us from really looking. For example, if asked what colour a shadow is, most people would immediately reply that a shadow is grey. But shadows are rarely grey! They reflect both the colour of the object that is causing the shadow, and the colour of the surface that the shadow is falling onto, and the light at that particular time of day. They can be blue, purple, yellow, orange, green, or just about any colour. But you won't know until you really look at them without making any assumptions.
When you draw, just keep reminding yourself to really look. Measure as you go along by eye (for example, keep on judging distances - is the height of the forehead longer than the length of the nose? How wide is the nose compared to the cheeks?) If it helps, start by drawing faint lines once you have examined and decided on these overall proportions. As you work in more detail and focus on the shading keep on comparing. I often start by looking to see where the very darkest areas of tone are and filling those in - then I can compare every other area of tone to it - are they lighter? By how much? The more you work methodically in this manner and the less you think about the fact that you are drawing someone's face rather than simply a collection of shapes and tones, the more relaxed you will feel as you do it and the better the result will be.
I've found looking at portraits from the past really useful. It's surprising to see how loose and expressive portraits from centuries ago can be. One trick you will learn is not to overdo the shading. This will result in a much more delicate portrait. I always aim to leave up to a third of the face totally untouched by my pencil - you can see an example here: http://annabregmanportraits.co.uk/pencil-portraits(1883912).htm Another trick which works very well is to vary the amount of detail that you draw in different parts of the image. So, I will try to put the most amount of detail and the most careful placing of my lines on the face (where likeness is crucial), then a little less in the hair and neck and less still in the shoulders, chest and arms which I have taken to leaving fairly sketchy. Visit museums and galleries if you can, and learn from the best!
Guides on Learning How to Draw for Beginners
By: Anna Bregman
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