Hello beautiful ladies and lads of Read.cash!
TL;DR: I'm giving some tips while showing part of my drawing process. If you want to see finished drawing go to the end of this post
I'll give describe some things I've learned about drawing:
1) Sketch: sketches are extremely important and they will help us to realize if an idea worths more time investment or not. Sketch is the first step to get a good quality result, if you aren't not a professional/experienced artist is not recommended to avoid this part of the drawing process. We must suggest forms or draw main features without focusing too much on every one of them in order to create a sketch.
Here you have my sketch of this drawing:
2) Expression lines: we should avoid to draw every single expression line when we are learning how to draw portraits. We don't have the experience enough yet to add all these lines, if we try to add all of them probably we will realize that the person we are trying to portrait seems older than actually is.
It's not recommended to avoid all expression lines of them either because it will make the person at the portrait look younger than actually is. We need to add some expression lines until reference and our portrait attempt seem similar enough, once we get more experience in this kind of drawing we'll be able to add all of them without making the portrait look like an older person compared to reference.
Here we can see how I added few expression lines (near his mouth) to make my portrait attempt look more similar to the reference image:
3) Hair: we have to learn how to represent long hair and short hair persons. The way we draw lines when we are representing long hair is generally not the same than when we are representing short hair.
When we want to draw short hair is recommended to draw consecutives short lines specially near sideburns and neck, the same can be applied to short beards. If we are near the mouth and we are dealing with a short beard is good to draw shorter lines or even consecutive points.
When we want to draw long hair is recommended to draw long "s" shaped lines and it's better to suggest hair figure using fewer lines than the ones we are used to make when drawing short hair. That way we can create some volume.
Note: there are thousands of ways we can draw hair and I'm just explaining one that worked good for me.
Here you can see how I drew hair (I will explain hair shading on another post)
4) 3D: we need to remember that if we want to give a realistic approachment to our portrait attempt we must think every facial feature as an already known 3D shape then try to twist them as much as we require in order to make it look like the reference. If we don't want a realistic approachment then it's ok to use 2D shapes to represent some facial features and other things.
Here is my Nick Jonas portrait attempt finished:
I hope you guys enjoy it.
Stay safe and have an excellent day!
