Masterclass: Drawing Faces. Portraits, Personality & Unexpected Ways of Seeing

Masterclass: Drawing Faces. Portraits, Personality & Unexpected Ways of Seeing

 

A three-part masterclass for artists, illustrators, sketchbook lovers, and anyone who has always wanted to draw faces and kept finding reasons not to.

Whether faces make you nervous, you already draw them all the time and want to loosen up, or you’ve simply never tried, this masterclass is a way in. It lifts the pressure, gives you a dozen different ways into a portrait, and lets you enjoy drawing people again.

---

 

 

 

---

Introduction:

For years I avoided drawing portraits. I was afraid they wouldn’t be beautiful enough, wouldn’t resemble the person, wouldn’t be good enough to show anyone. So I stayed away.

Then drawing faces saved my life. I mean that literally. In the middle of a severe depression, when nothing helped, the one thing I thought of doing to get myself back into creativity was open Pinterest, find a face, and draw it in whatever material I fancied. I was so bad at it that I felt zero responsibility for the outcome, and that was the whole point. No pressure to perform. I filled a sketchbook in three months and loved every page.

It changed how I think about faces. You don’t need academic training. You don’t need to measure proportions or build a face with a pencil. It doesn’t even have to look like the person. Portraits are about other things, and this masterclass is everything I’ve worked out about what those things are.

---

What you’ll discover inside:

A three-part masterclass where you’ll learn:

• Why “good” portraits are overrated, and why that idea has been stopping you
• How your brain reads almost anything as a face, so you can’t get it wrong
• How to embrace ugly, starting with the ugliest portrait you can imagine
• How to express a person through colour, mood and atmosphere
• How to tell someone’s whole story through their clothes, objects, setting and pose
• Ways into a portrait for when the face itself feels too hard
• Loosening-up exercises that break your habits and preconceptions
• How collage makes you think in shapes instead of lines
• Small, practical assignments to come back to whenever you feel stuck

---

Why join?

✔️ You’ll stop waiting until you’re “good enough” and start drawing faces now
✔️ You’ll have a whole set of ways into a portrait, so a blank page never stops you
✔️ You’ll learn to put a person’s mood, story and character on the page, the parts that actually make them who they are
✔️ You’ll find which way in suits you best: colour, composition, objects, expression, or line
✔️ You’ll walk away looser, braver, and enjoying the process, which is the one marker that tells you you’re on the right path

---

This Masterclass is for you if…

🐝  You’ve always wanted to draw faces and kept finding reasons not to
🐝 You were taught portraits the academic way and it put you off completely
🐝 You love sketchbooks and want a freer, more direct way to draw people
🐝 You care more about expression and character than about a technical likeness
🐝 You enjoy experimenting and want practical exercises you can return to a. gain and again
🐝 You’re a designer or illustrator who thinks in shapes, composition or objects, and you want a way into faces that plays to that

Materials You’ll Need

Almost anything you already own. Truly.

✨ Any drawing materials you like: pencil, pen, ink, watercolour, gouache, pastels, whatever’s on your desk. Different exercises suit different media, so a bit of variety helps.
✨ A4 or A5 medium-weight mixed-media paper. Nothing fancy like watercolour paper. (An iPad works too.)
✨ A mirror, or just your phone for selfies. Most of the exercises are self-portraits.
✨ Scraps of coloured paper, old magazines, fabric, buttons or small objects for the collage section.
✨ A timer for the quick exercises. Your phone is fine.

I’m not drawing alongside you in this one, and that’s deliberate. There’s an example of everything I’ve done, but it should have zero effect on what you make. This is my way of drawing a face. Yours can be completely different, and it should be.

Tag me @elinaellis and @IndigoBee.Academy and use #IBA_portraits so we can see what you’re making. 💛