How to Draw People - But Fun!

I've recently released my latest course - How to Sketch People - and along with that I have a warm up YouTube video and this blog post to get you started on your journey.

Sketching people is REALLY SCARY!!

And if you feel that way, you are far from alone - in fact, I think most people reading this (including me, writing this) would agree.

But that doesn't mean it has to stay scary, if we just break down the concepts and make life a little easier for ourselves.

What do you need to know to get started?

I think that there are just two or three ideas that you should learn, to give you confidence to dive in.

These are:

• Proportions (4 key rules)

• Colours (just 4 colours)

• The concepts of 'not overvaluing' features

Fortunately, all of this is covered in my YouTube video below and this blog post.

Proportions

The key to getting a face feeling human is an awareness of how to position the key features, the eyes, nose and mouth, and keep them approximately in proportion with the whole head.

So here are the 'key points' that I suggest memorising.

Firstly, the eyes are in the middle of the head.

Secondly the eyes are separated horizontally by another eye's width.

The nose and mouth divide the lower half of the face into thirds.

Finally, the pupils are at the corner of the mouth

And COLOURS - what about them?

Well this is even easier - simply by mixing red, yellow, warm-brown (or even reddy-range) and blue, with plenty of water you can make a vast range of natural feeling skin tones. It's really as simple as that!

And you talked about not 'overvaluing' features?

Yes indeed - this is something that I go into a lot of detail about in the full course, but it is simply the idea that we, as humans, tend to make eyes, noses and mouths very big.

We overvalue them, simply because they are the features we recognise instantly, subconciously.

If we can keep for overdrawing them, making them too big or too bold then usually we'll get a good likeness on the page.

But it's also about breaking rules!

To illustrate this idea, here is a step-by-step sketch of me and Betty on Tash and I's wedding day.

(also, doesn't Betty look lovely!)

The first step is to find the key shapes of my head, notice, however, that my head is angling down and the photographer is below us. Already the proportions we talked about can't quite work. So we have to observe, allow ourselves some mistakes and use very simple rules to keep us approximately on the right track.

Here, I focus on lining up the nose and my ear at the right angle, and pop the eyes in the middle of my head.

Hands are really horrible to draw, and another feature we tend to overvalue - here, I think they are important to the scene, so I allow myself to draw individual fingers but I make sure they are crude and 'characture-esque' rather than risking trying to make them artistic and over-valued.

Betty's face, you may note, is also built from simple shapes here.

Before then adding a sense of the background and some bolder lines where they help to structure the image.

Next are the colours, remember that colour mixes can be simple but also note how I've 'broken rules' by leaving negative space, changing the background colours too, rather than trying too hard to make this 'perfect'.

From here, we are surprisingly close to finished.

Indeed the final touches are jsut to add bright and bold colours, using a smaller brush. Allowing some expressivity to develop, whilst preserving the white paper too.

Bold lines finish the sketch off and the 'less is more' approach is complete.

And here is a scan of the finished piece!