Portrait Drawing Tip 93
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How to spot mistakes in portraits
As a Drawing Academy tutor, I often get portrait drawings for critique. Beginner artists often do not see mistakes because they do not know the rules of portrait drawing. Such rules are about construction, proportions, angles, alignments, anatomy and tonal rendering. Drawing from observation results in mistakes because people do not see what they don't know. For example, if you do not know classical canons of proportions, you would not know what to measure from life and check in drawing. If you do not know how to check alignments of facial features, how would you make sure they are correct in your artwork? That is why to draw good portraits, you need to learn a set of rules and follow them one by one. When you know what you need to check, spotting mistakes is easy. For example, if you know that the line of eyes divides the head's height in half, it is very easy to check if your portrait follows that rule. Many artists don't know this rule and make a junior mistake of placing eyes too high. There are many more proportions and other rules you need to know.
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