Portrait Drawing Tips

How to draw portraits from memory

As a Life Drawing Academy tutor, I often receive questions such as "How to draw portraits from memory?" Many art students believe that for drawing recognizable portraits they need photographic memory. This is an erroneous idea because one of the main functions of a human brain is to forget; otherwise, a brain would be flooded with endless information it receives every second. "Forgetting" how models look doesn't help in making portraits. So, what is the solution? One of the ways of drawing realistic portraits from memory is by memorizing only those facial features that deviate from a classical canon of proportions. For example, if a model has wide eyes, but otherwise looks like Venus, the only thing you need to remember is about her eyes. The rest would follow classical Greek and Roman proportions. Of course, there are not many models that look like ancient gods, so you may need to memorize several deviations, but it will be much easier than to remember individual peculiarities of every facial feature.

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