M2M Day 33: There’s a science to drawing portraits, and it’s all based on triangles
This post is part of Month to Master, a 12-month accelerated learning project. For December, my goal is to draw a realistic self-portrait with only pencil and paper.
This month, to learn how to draw portraits, I’ll be following the Portrait Drawing video course from Vitruvian Studio.
Today, I spent 2.5 hours starting the course and beginning my first portrait.
Selecting who to draw
For my first piece, rather than drawing the model from the course, I’ve chosen to draw Derren Brown, who originally inspired me to pursuit portrait drawing.
Derren is a British illusionist, who I’ve been following for a while now, and who, I recently learned, casually paints portraits on the side.
Here are a few things he’s casually painted.
After seeing these, I decided I too would like to be the kind of person that casually paints impressively good portraits on the side.
For now, before I get to the painting, I’ll start off by mastering the drawing part of program.
This is the picture of Derren I’m drawing.
And here’s my setup.
Starting the drawing
The first module of the course focuses on mapping out the portrait, which includes determining the shape of the head and locating the features.
Finding the top and bottom of the head
I started by arbitrarily drawing two lines on the page to indicate the level of the top of the head and the level of the bottom of the head.
Then, I arbitrarily marked, on the top level, the highest point of the head, and then used the angle between this point and the bottom of the chin, to locate the bottom of the chin on the page.
I also drew in the level of the notch of the neck. The first time, I drew it too low, so I moved it up. I gauged this distances as a proposition of the head length.
Find the leftmost and rightmost parts of the head
With the topmost and bottommost points identified, I then needed to identify the leftmost and rightmost points.
To do this, I used a new technique I learned called triangulation. To triangulate a new point, I first sight (try to visualize) the angles to this new point from two existing points. Then, I draw lines from the existing points in the direction of the new point based on the sighted angles. Finally, I mark the new point where the lines intersect.
After checking the angles again, I updated these two new points.
To check, I then sighted the angle between the two new points, ensuring this angle matches what I see on Derren’s head.
Drawing the shape of the head
With these four outer points drawn, the next step is to draw in the shape of the head. To do this, I continued to triangulate more points, and draw in the necessary curves to connect them.
I continued in this way, until I outlined the entire shape of the head.
It didn’t look quite right, so I checked a bunch of angles.
Once it seemed closer, I added in the neck and shoulders.
With the neck and shoulders in place, it again didn’t look right. So, I checked more angles and made adjustments as necessary (mostly to broaden the jaw)
The head was now looking pretty good, but the neck and shoulders needed a few adjustments. I retriangulated, and adjusted the collar upwards.
That’s it for today
Getting to this point took me 2.5 hours, which was split between watching the video course and drawing my Derren portrait.
So far, the portrait doesn’t look like much, but I still learned a bunch today. I particularly like the triangulation technique, which makes drawing much more procedural and mathematical (a.k.a. easier for me).
Tomorrow, I’ll continue following the course, and start drawing in the facial features.
Read the next post. Read the previous post.
