# Drawing and Painting Portraits: A Guide for Artists - review & insight | Gareth B. Davies Source: https://garethbdavies.com/course-insights/drawing-and-painting-portraits-a-guide-for-artists/ [← All courses](https://garethbdavies.com/course-insights/) Illustration & Drawing · Solid intro · Rated 8 /10 # Drawing and Painting Portraits: A Guide for Artists By Gareth B. Davies · Updated July 2026 Gabrielle Brickey · Portrait Artist - ArtworkbyGabrielle.com Intermediate · 139 min A working iPad portrait workflow from a professional artist, but it demands solid figure-drawing fundamentals before Procreate ever opens. [Get a Free Month on Skillshare](https://skillshare.eqcm.net/c/3155494/298081/4650?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.skillshare.com%2Fclasses%2Fdrawing-and-painting-portraits-a-guide-for-artists%2F1451183192) New to Skillshare? Your first month is free, enough to take this course at no cost. ## A structural approach, not a copying exercise This course opens with a decision that shapes everything after it: portraits are built from geometric logic before they are built from likeness. The head becomes an egg, a block, or a ball with a jaw, three interchangeable shorthand forms the instructor uses to establish structure before a single feature goes in. From there, proportion is taught through halving measurements: split skull-to-chin to find the eye line, split brow-to-chin to find the root of the nose, and use that same span to place the ears and the top of the forehead. It sounds mechanical written out, but demonstrated on both a male and female head side by side, with the jaw shape, brow arch, and neck thickness adjusted between them, it reads as a genuinely transferable system rather than a one-off diagram. The anatomy section is the course's backbone. Rather than naming every muscle in the face, it isolates the ones that actually show up in a rendered portrait: the masseter and temporalis for a convincing jaw, the sternocleidomastoid for a neck that turns and nods believably, and the nasolabial fat compartments that separate a youthful face from an aged one. The instruction to watch these move in a mirror while clenching the jaw is a small but effective piece of self-directed practice built into the lesson itself. Feature-by-feature breakdowns follow the same discipline. Lips are reduced to three top shapes and two bottom pillow forms, with the philtrum and node explained as the parts that catch light and soften the corners. Hair gets the most emphatic advice in the whole course: stop thinking in strands, block in value masses first, and only add stray hairs at the very end. The demonstrated trick of running a nearly finished hair painting through a crosshatch filter to check whether the value structure reads without detail is a genuinely useful diagnostic, not just a cool effect. ## Where it earns its intermediate label The painting demonstrations are long, screen-recorded, and unhurried, following full pieces from blocked-in shapes through smudge-tool blending to final highlight touches. That pacing is a strength for anyone who wants to see a real decision-making process, including the corrections, like scaling up a face that reads too narrow or fixing an eyebrow that accidentally reads as worried. It is also where the course's ceiling becomes visible: none of this instruction assumes the viewer needs to be taught how to see proportion or judge a mark, only how to organize what they already see. The closing section on materials, references, and portrait commission pricing is brief but practical, pointing toward free stock sites and giving honest, non-formulaic advice on valuing one's own work. Procreate specifics like alpha-locking a duplicated reference layer for easy comparison are handled clearly, though anyone working outside Procreate will need to translate every workflow step themselves. The course delivers exactly what it promises: a structural, anatomy-aware method for building portraits, best suited to someone who can already draw but wants a sturdier framework underneath their work. The standout The bottom-third subdivision of the face, splitting the nose-to-chin distance into thirds to place the lip part and the chin plane, gives a repeatable, memorizable proportion check that resolves the single most common amateur mistake. ## What you will learn - · How to block in a head using the egg, block, and ball-and-jaw shorthand methods and locate the eye line, brow line, and nose root through halving measurements - · How to identify skull landmarks (zygomatic arch, glabella, temporal line) and surface muscles (masseter, temporalis, sternocleidomastoid) that shape a likeness - · How to build gesture drawings that capture head tilt, contour, and facial rhythm lines before committing to detail - · How to construct eyes, nose, lips, and ears from simplified geometric forms rather than copying outlines - · A full alpha-lock, layer-duplication, and reference-comparison painting workflow in Procreate, including the Photoshop crosshatch trick for simplifying hair - · How to export, resize, sharpen, and share finished work, plus basic pricing guidance for portrait commissions Best for: Intermediate iPad artists who already have some drawing experience and want a structural, anatomy-grounded approach to painting recognizable portraits in Procreate. Skip it if: Complete beginners with no prior drawing practice, or anyone who paints portraits outside Procreate looking for medium-specific technical instruction. Helpful Examples Clarity of Instruction Engaging Teacher Organization of Lessons [Get a Free Month on Skillshare](https://skillshare.eqcm.net/c/3155494/298081/4650?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.skillshare.com%2Fclasses%2Fdrawing-and-painting-portraits-a-guide-for-artists%2F1451183192)