Sketching People - How to Sketch Faces
Learn to Sketch Portraits with Ed Hall
Faces are a favorite subject, but our desire for realism means that too often, we resort to tracing and obsessive, photo-realist detail, losing the creative touches and personality that a freehand drawing can offer. In this drawing lesson from cartoonist Ed Hall, you can learn how to draw a face freehand from life or a photograph, allowing your artistic personality, as well as the subject's personality, to shine through in your sketch.
While photorealist portraiture emphasises fine surface detail, the sketched portrait values a combination of line and tone, with contour and cross contour describing form, and expressive mark-making encouraged. Drawing freehand brings your portraits to life.
You can copy Ed's lesson exactly, or use it to guide you as you draw a portrait from your own favorite photograph.
Begin Sketching the Head Structure
We'll get started by roughing out the the basic shapes of the head - two ovals overlapping. The main oval gives us the shape of the face, while a secondary oval describes the back of the head. The exact position of your ovals might vary, depending on the angle of your sitter's head. So observe carefully, ignoring the detail of features, and try to see just the main shapes of the head. Next we make a 'note' of where the features will go with construction lines, drawing the line of the eyes, base of the nose and the general location of the mouth.
Also, I am very careful at this point to make sure of the placement of the ears. A beautiful portrait can easily be ruined by misplaced ears. The ears will typically fall where your two overlapping ovals intersect. This also relates to where the jaw bone connects to the upper part of the skull. This part is very important! A little extra care with this step will help you to create a great drawing.Sculpting Planes of the Face with Light and Shadow
Now we start to 'search' for the various planes across the face.Good lighting helps a great deal at this stage, as a natural, angled fall of light will emphasise the planes. Looking for how the shadows fall to create planes is similar toworking like a sculptor in your drawings. Imagine that you are carving the face and instead of soft curves - you'd have hard edges. Too many people forget that as light crosses planes it creates a shape. These shapes are the building blocks of a structurally sound, and “sculptural” drawing. Everything has planes: hair, cheek bones, eye sockets, the forehead, etc. Draw the planes as shapes and you are well on your way to understanding figurative form.
