Facial Features Course portrait week one

Day One Hundred and Eleven of Sketching People

Continuing on with day 111 of my #Kick365 sketching challenge to draw people in ink and watercolour. This week Dylan Sara started his new live Ink Portraits course, but I also signed up for his Facial Features course, which is currently available online, so I’m going to be working my way through both of them at the same time.

Dylan hosted an introductory session for this facial features course and the main takeaway was:

If you can recognise values and shapes and how they connect – you can draw anything.

Facial Features Class

My purpose for doing this facial features class is to get quicker at simplifying features. I also want to practice how to really see the relationships between facial elements, and be able to identify angles and perspectives more intuitively.

Facial Features Class – Eyes

I used a fine liner for these sketches. I’m not used to using cross hatching, but I wanted to follow along with the style of sketching Dylan was using for the eye tutorial, so gave it a go. I’m not a massive fan of the look of cross-hatching, but it was a good way of depicting tonal values simply.

Usually when I’m urban sketching people, the facial features are quite small, so cross hatching isn’t really a viable option. So I used the reference photos to create a second version of the sketches with watercolour tonal shading, rather than cross hatching.

The eyes are such an important part of any people sketching activity because they’re the natural focal point, and are essential for conveying emotion or supporting the story in a sketch. You really need to capture the light, dark, and mid-tone variations to make sure the eyes don’t look flat and lifeless.

My biggest takeaway from this eyes tutorial was to really pay attention to the value shift between the white of the eye and the bottom eyelid. When there’s reflected light in this area, you don’t have to draw a continuous line along the bottom of the eye – instead you can use a broken line. This helps to give the sketch a looser feel and stops the bottom lid from feeling flattened and solid, and gives the eye more dimension and shape.

This ties into my desire to simplify facial features so I’m going to practice incorporating this technique into my urban sketches and portraits.

Facial Features Class – Week 1 Portrait

Each set of the facial features lessons ends with a portrait session to put our new facial features skills to the test. Dylan sketched the portrait with a coloured pencil and used cross hatching. Although I usually sketch directly in ink, I opted for a watercolour pencil with tonal shading.

I was really pleased with how I was able to capture a likeness to the reference image. Chris usually participates in Dylan’s Tuesday live zoom sketching sessions, so I’ve sketched him quite a few times already but always speed sketching against the clock, so this is the first time I’ve done such a studied portrait.