Draw Realistic Pencil Portraits - Basic Techniques To Help You Learn

This class will teach you how to draw beautiful realistic pencil portraits.

After taking this class, you will gain technical knowledge and you will also know how to apply this knowledge into action! You will be presented with unique exercises that will help you to advance with your skills even further. 

You will learn:

• Which materials you are most likely to need and how to use them
• The basics of facial measurements and facial anatomy
• The basics on how to see the face as three dimensional with the help of shapes, shading and facial planes
• How to construct the eye, nose, and lips from scratch
• How to render a portrait using a photo reference from measuring to the last detail

Those are the most important anatomical landmarks I would say. Don't be so concerned about knowing it's names etc, however, focus more on locating those on the actual face. For example, try to observe the cheekbones on a person. If they're smiling, can you see the dimple etc.

If you're a complete beginner, you don't have to be concerned about advanced anatomy. Try to understand the facial measurements, shapes and shading first.

Loomis's Head Planes

Those are for you as guidelines to study from. Study those as much as you can, keep finding the individual planes on the faces. Learn how to shade them as well.

All the materials I’ve used:

Mars Lumograph Pencils

Staedtler Noris HB Pencil

Strathmore Drawing 400 Series paper

Rotring 600 Mechanical Pencil

Mono Zero Eraser

Opinel No.06 Knife

Blending Stumps, Sand Papers and Putty Eraser

Books which helped me a great deal:

Vilppu Drawing Manual

Drawing The Head and Hands by Andrew Loomis

Drawing Light and Shade by Giovanni Civardi

Free reference pages:

Unsplash

Pixabay

Pexels

The reference I've used in this video comes from: k8_iv

Music from: Epidemic Sound

Planes image from: RapidFireArt