Drawing people, or better still, portrait drawing, is an intimate correspondence between artist and subject. With line and tone we map both the physical landscape and character of another human being. This is what makes portrait drawing a deeply satisfying engagement.
Beginner artists begin with drawing the eyes and growing the portrait outwards. Others will begin with an oval and employ a generic template: the eyes are vertically centred; the nose, likewise, is then centred between the eyes and chin, etc.
To be blunt: this is a recipe for a poor drawing.
The biggest stumbling block in drawing people is our ingrained idea of what people look like. A disconnect occurs when we begin to draw. We see an object as it is, but no sooner is pencil put to paper than the symbolic preconception of what we are looking at comes bubbling forth. An example is when we draw an eye. Every beginner artist draws the universal symbol for an eye: an elliptical football shape with a circle for the iris. Learning how to draw people is about extricating these symbolic preconceptions.
The tried-and-true classical approach to drawing people is to first draw the large overall shape of the head. Generally, this is called the contour. I prefer to term this first instance as striking the arabesque. Terminology implies intent. For me, contour is static whereas arabesque speaks of rhythm and movement.
The overall shape of the head is more rectilinear than it is an oval. An excellent training exercise is to strike the arabesque of simple shapes on a sheet of plexiglass using a water-soluble black marker and then hold it up to your object to ascertain the accuracy of your drawing. Down-filled pillows that hold a shape when scrunched up are excellent fodder for learning how to draw people.
Once the arabesque is accurately drawn the next step is to place the brow line. Anatomically speaking, this is the Supra Orbital Eminence. This thick, horizontal skeletal structure is the singularly most important landmark in drawing people. Misplace this feature and your portrait drawing is doomed. There is no mincing words here. From the brow line every other feature is mapped.
Let us take our training exercise a step further. Affix a 1/4 inch strip of black tape horizontally onto your scrunched up pillow a short distance above the centre point. Without pre-measuring take your best guess and indicate the placement of this tape within your arabesque on the plexiglass. Now hold up the plexiglass to your pillow -- you will need to focus your drawing so that the arabesque fits -- and ascertain the accuracy of your brow line.
Most beginners will place the brow line too high. The reason for this, again, is our inveterate symbolic preconceptions. When we correspond with other people it is the facial expressions that play the largest role in a dialogue. Hence, we tend to over-emphasize the face in our portrait drawing.
Spending even a short time on this very powerful drawing exercise pays handsome dividends. Training yourself to consistently strike the arabesque and place the brow line accurately is your critical first step in learning how to draw people.
Michael Britton is a painter, teacher and writer. Trained at the Art Students' League and the New York Academy of Art, Michael has exhibited and taught extensively in his almost 30 year career. Michael was the co-founder and Artistic Director of the Vancouver Academy of Art for seven years (1997-2004). He is the author of nine video workshops that are all available at http://www.artacademy.com/. His teaching focuses on traditional portrait drawing and painting in addition to composition and color theory.
Michael also travels and paints en plein air extensively. His comic travelogues and oil sketches are published at http://www.en-plein-air.com/.
