When sketching someone’s face, how do you capture the essential features of that face, to make sure your sketch looks like them?
I can draw people, and the drawings look decent, but they rarely look like the person I’m trying to draw.
FYI, I have had only art classes from way back in high school, so no formal training. I was just wondering if there are particular areas of the face to look for, e.g. the eyes, the distance of the nose to the mouth, etc.
Of course, you can precisely copy every single aspect of a face to ensure that it looks like your subject, but from some satirical (e.g. political) sketches, you can see that they captured the “essence” of Clinton, Palin, etc even though they have distorted many of their facial features. So making an exact copy of someone’s face is not necessary. You just have to capture the essential features.
Is being able to do this something that can be learned, or is it one of those things where you either have it or you don’t?
I’ll bump, because I’m curious. I wanted to a a political cartoonist when I was younger, and getting someone “recognizable” was a challenge. It was easiest for me with adult men, who develop a lot of character in their faces as they age that can be used as a foundation.
I ran into an artistic ability wall when my “Lee Iacocca” always ended up as “Ed McMahon”.
Many artists “crutch” themselves with props in the scene to help identify the subject.
The “holy grail” that I’d hope to achieve is the famous Alfred Hitchcock profile using a few simple strokes and curves, yet it is instantly recognizable.
I think it may be something you’re born with, to a point. You can be taught the mechanics of perspective and light and shadow, but capturing the essence is tricky. My husband and I are both artists, both very good with portraits, and we’ve both been commissioned for portraits in a variety of mediums. The biggest difference between our work is that he cannot, for the life of him, do a caricature, although he’s a better portraiture. I think it’s just a matter of how you see a person.
But don’t give up. I know this sounds like cheating, but try tracing photographs, just to get the outline of the basic features, and practice shading and “fleshing out” your picture. As you do this, you will be learning what comprises the elements of the face. This could go a long way towards developing your grasp of the essence of a face. As you become more familiar with drawing traced faces, try to freehand one of the pictures you’ve traced. I bet you’ll see a marked improvement at your skills.
And go to the library - there are many really good books that demonstrate, step-by-step, how to draw faces. I ate these books up as a kid, as did Mr. singular, and they were vey helpful. That may be pretty old school - there’s probably tons of stuff on You Tube demonstrating the same info.
Portraiture is probably the most difficult type of drawing - much more difficult than, say, figure drawing.
I have taken this portraiture class offered by a local college extension, and it is very hard to “capture the essence” of a particular person. The teacher even made the point that the goal is to draw something that others will recognize as “human”, and worry about it looking like the person later
If you understand the general dimensions (eyes at the midpoint - “equator” of the head, spacing of the nose to mouth, etc. - this stuff is covered in all the books), then you look for features that differ (usually VERY slightly) from these standard dimensions. If you capture those differences correctly, then you’re on your way.
But the best advice (and this goes for any type of drawing - not just portraiture) I can give is this: step back and look at what you’ve done. When you draw, you have a tendency to get focused in on the piece you’re working on. And then you move to the next, etc… But if you take a break, even walk away for a bit, and then look at your drawing as a whole - BIG things will jump out at you. This is how best to see if you’ve gone “off track”. The more you do this, the earlier you may see where you are off track.
For example, say you drew the nose at a certain angle. And then started drawing the eyes relative to that nose. But if the angle of the nose is off, then the eyes will also be off. You may not see just how off the nose angle is until you started adding the eyes, though. But you would want to go back and fix the nose first, then redo the eyes.
You can find lots of big bargain photography books with lots of photos of just faces. I used these to practice with. The good news is that the photos don’t “move”. The bad news is that they are only 2-D (even when you do a good drawing of a photo, it tends to look 2-D). But it’s a great way to practice capturing the uniqueness in a face.
