Drawing and Painting Portraits: A Guide for Artists
Gabrielle Brickey · Portrait Artist - ArtworkbyGabrielle.com
Breaks down head anatomy into three named professional systems for structuring believable, three-dimensional portraits.
What you will learn
- Constructing the head from egg, block and ball-with-jaw forms and adjusting proportions for male and female faces
- Reading skull landmarks, facial muscles and fat compartments that shape surface likeness
- Applying three portrait conceptualizations: forms thinking, Loomis-style plane breakdown, and the Reilly abstraction
- Drawing gesture sketches that capture head tilt, contour and facial rhythms before rendering
- Rendering eyes, noses and lips in Procreate with layered value, colour and smudge techniques
Standout ideas
- The Reilly abstraction: a set of interlocking rhythm lines and ovals (from Frank J. Reilly's method) that connect features like the eye corners, nose wings and mouth into one coherent structure
- Rendering logic tied to form type: light falls off gradually on ball-like areas such as the nose tip but more abruptly on blocky planes like the nose bridge
- Using a blurred, duplicated reference layer while painting to judge big value shapes instead of getting pulled into premature detail
Best for: Intermediate digital artists who already know Procreate basics and want a structural, anatomy-based approach to drawing realistic portraits.
This class delivers a genuinely deep, well-organized anatomy and construction system for portraiture, covering three distinct conceptual frameworks (forms, planes, and the Reilly method) that most beginner portrait classes skip entirely. Its main limitation is tool specificity: the demos and interface tips are built entirely around Procreate on iPad, so artists working in traditional media or other software will need to translate the painting-process sections themselves. The anatomy and proportion content, however, transfers to any medium.