Drawing Portraits from Imagination for Beginner Artists

Drawing portraits can be a tough challenge. Drawing them from imagination therefor often seems impossible! Rest assured, it is quite the opposite...if you know where to start!

Unknown to many people, the head or portrait is not some magical complex form. It can be broken down into simple structure.  And guess what?...Artists have know this for ages! And some of them were kind enough to tell us 😊 Among them Andrew Loomis who created the now well-known Loomis method of head construction.

As soon as we can place a simplified head in many angles in space. We're off to a great start! Now we can start adding the simplified facials features. Such as the eyes, the nose, the tooth cylinder and the ears. To keep things simple we must start with a simplified version of these features. And in order to simplify the head features, we need to understand form manipulation (covered in a previous post).

By using simplified forms we can start creating the illusion of a face with correct proportions in ANY angle we so choose! And thus we began the magic of drawing a face from imagination. Exciting right?!

Now that we understand simple form and the proportions of the head in space, we are ready to dive into anatomy. Learning anatomy now becomes child's play because we merely need to understand the anatomy of the features within the simplified forms we already understand! At Artwod we call this 'Anatomy informed shape manipulation'. Yeah...that's a mouthful! But it's easier to draw than to pronounce, trust me.

Before we start drawing people we know, we should first have a little fun with everything we've learned so far. Why? Glad you asked! We want to practice the simplified form of the head and portrait and see if we can have a little fun with the proportions and features. This is not too say we should only draw cartoony characters or caricatures, but we should practice this skill because it will allow us to create more stylistic choice in our own art. Doing this we start to create our own voice as an artist, we start seeing shapes and forms we like to draw.  And this will eventually drastically improve the portraits we are going to draw from imagination. 

But wait...weren't you teaching us to draw from imagination?? What is this trickery?! No tricks! Drawing from observation is a vital skill to improving our drawings from imagination.  We are literally filling our visual library with more accurate information about the human face and picking up on subtle details from many different personalities.  But here's the kicker! Instead of only drawing what we see, we encourage you to redraw that same portrait in different angles.  Now you are practicing imaginary drawing while observing a reference.  And this...will give you god-like drawing powers!

Now we have arrived at the final stage of Drawing Portraits from Imagination...the imagination part!

Once our shape is established, we can start adding all the structure we've learned back into this shape. - We can use the Loomis method to find the basic form.