How to Draw a Portrait

How to Draw a Portrait: Step-by-step Instructions for Beginner Artists

Vladimir London created this book for art students who want to improve their portrait drawing skills. In this book, he explains in detail how to draw a portrait in the three-quarter view. This step-by-step guide comes with great illustrations and easy to follow instructions.

Many fine artists found this book particularly helpful because it describes not only basic steps of portrait drawing, but also human head anatomy, proportions and know-how of drawing facial features.

Get this book on Amazon »

Here's what Vladimir London says:

"As the founder of Life Drawing Academy and an art teacher, I often receive letters from students who ask how to draw a more realistic portrait. They often send their own drawings and paintings for constructive critique.

When it comes to portraits, I frequently see common mistakes by many students. This book analyzes those mistakes and explains how to avoid them using the correct steps and rules of constructing a human head in drawing. Simple mistakes are made by beginner artists for many reasons, the main ones are their lack of knowledge of drawing principles, the anatomy and proportions of a human head, and the laws of perspective and their use in drawing.

All those reasons create one large challenge when making a human portrait. A professional artist draws what he knows, and a beginner copies what he sees; this leads to unavoidable mistakes. Constructive drawing, which is praised by traditional Russian art schools, is the foundation of building an artistic work. I specifically use the word "build" and not "draw" because we are using the constructive principles of drawing, drawing what we know, and not copying what we see. In order to explain why the idea "draw what you know, not what you see" is so important, I'll give the following example. When a beginner artist decides to draw a portrait, he assumes it's necessary to accurately draw the eyes, mouth, and nose seen in real life; however, in doing so, he forgets about the general construction of the head, its proportions, and, in other words, he begins to paint the walls before the house is built.

Drawing a portrait correctly requires you to draw much more than what you see. That is why, in constructive drawing, knowledge of anatomy and proportions is so important. The term "constructive drawing" implies the construction of the head. The teaching of step-by-step constructive drawing is an outstanding quality of the Russian art school that I would like to share with you.

In this book, you will see the secrets of building a portrait step-by-step. We will also look at the anatomy of the human head, its proportions, and will cover such topics as how to draw facial features such as the eyes, the nose, the mouth, and the ears. Knowing all of this, you'll be able to draw a more realistic portrait by depicting not only what you see, but what you know."

If you want to learn how to correctly draw a portrait, this book, without a doubt, will be helpful for you.

Get this book on Amazon »

To learn good drawing techniques, enroll in the Life Drawing Academy course: