Drawing Portraits- Post 1

Portraits are a classic thing to draw but they are incredibly difficult to do well.
In this post you will see my first attempt at a proper portrait, not like the first 2 images of this blog.

It was done entirely in pen and the portrait is of Jet Li, the famous martial arts actor, from the cover of the DVD 'Fearless' (a great film by the way).

Before I show you the picture however, I would like to talk a bit about portraits. If you have tried to do a portrait or self-portrait in the past you will be aware of how difficult it is to achieve a good likeness of the person you are drawing. People who are good at portraits have spent a lot of time practicing drawing faces.

In a portrait one wrong line can make the image look like a completely different person and this is because faces are unique. People who look similar to each other are different people and you can tell that they are different because of slight changes in their features; eyes are slightly different, a slightly larger forehead or chin or a slightly longer or rounder face.
These differences can be minute but to you they are obviously different. The same goes for twins, people who know twins can tell the difference between the two because although they are identical they do not look exactly the same.

So when it comes to drawing a portrait you can be very close to achieving a likeness of the person but a wrong line, slightly too much shading in one area/not enough in another can really change the whole look of who you are drawing.

Here's the original image below followed by my attempt.

Although I captured the basic essence of the image itself in regards to shadows and shape I was unable to capture the man in the picture.

There is too much emphasis on the large shadow on his cheek and the shadow near his lip going across his face looks more like a scar.

There is lots of room for improvement and perhaps my next portrait attempt will be more successful. It is one of those things where you must practice in order to be able to draw faces well.

I have heard it said that if you can draw faces accurately then you can draw anything and I would not be surprised if that is true.

Many people are disheartened after their first, second or third attempts at drawing people because they still can't quite do them properly. It will take weeks or even months to truly begin to draw people with more accuracy but you must practice. I am going to include portraits as a part of my routine because they are difficult and in order to grow and become better, at anything not just drawing, we must challenge ourselves and go beyond what we can do and try things where we might fail. We often learn more from our failures than our successes.The important thing is always trying again.

Do not be ashamed of your first attempts at portraits, look at them as a starting point and a place to grow from. I would like to see your first attempts and maybe even put some on this post to show people that we all must start somewhere and that it takes time and patience to develop the skills necessary to draw portraits.