Portrait Drawing & Realistic Rendering

This level is for anyone who wants a portrait to look like the person in front of them. Likeness is often treated as a mysterious gift, when it is largely a matter of measurement: a face that does not resemble its subject is usually a face whose features are in slightly the wrong places. Correcting placement corrects likeness far more reliably than rendering harder does.

By the end of this level you can produce a recognisable likeness with features in the right places and a head that sits correctly on the neck. You can measure a face systematically and catch placement errors early, and you can construct a head rather than drawing a collection of features. Likeness becomes a procedure you can follow rather than an accident.

This level is for artists whose portraits are accurate but look like drawings rather than people. Correct placement produces a likeness; what produces a living face is the description of surface, and skin, hair and eyes each behave in specific ways that generic shading cannot capture. This level is about rendering different materials rather than uniformly darkening a correct drawing.

By the end of this level your portraits describe a living surface, with skin, hair and eyes reading convincingly as different materials. You can light a face to suit the subject rather than accepting whatever light is available, and you can render soft transitions without losing the underlying structure. The drawing starts to look like a person rather than a correct diagram of one.

This level is for artists taking on difficult likenesses and demanding rendering. A three-quarter view of a young face in even light is the easy case; the difficult cases are extreme angles, faces marked by age, unfamiliar skin tones and lighting that hides most of the structure. Each of these defeats the approaches that work on straightforward subjects.

By the end of this level you can render a portrait to a high finish from any angle while keeping the drawing alive beneath the rendering. You can draw faces of any age and colouring convincingly, and you can handle lighting that conceals more than it reveals. Difficult portraits become a question of method rather than of luck with the subject.

This level is for artists after character rather than resemblance. A portrait can be an exact likeness and tell you nothing about the person, and the portraits that endure are rarely the most photographically accurate. At this stage the question is what you have understood about the sitter, and which of the thousands of available details actually carry that understanding.

By the end of this level you can make a portrait that says something about who the person is, and judge when less rendering produces a stronger likeness than more. You can work with a sitter productively, draw a face from memory, and build a series of portraits that share an approach. The portrait becomes an interpretation rather than a record.