Start Drawing: Techniques for Pencil Portraits
Gabrielle Brickey · Portrait Artist - ArtworkbyGabrielle.com
Learn measurable face proportions and pencil plane-shading, taught with genuine rigor and precision.
What you will learn
- Placing eyes, nose, lips and ears using proportional divisions of the face (halves and thirds)
- Breaking the face and nose into flat planes to read light and shade accurately
- Identifying and drawing the five shadow zones: highlight, halftone, form shadow, core shadow, reflected light, cast shadow
- Structuring and shading the eye, nose, mouth and ear using their underlying anatomy
- Drawing hair in clumped strokes and using a scrap-paper burnishing trick for realistic texture
Standout ideas
- The face divides symmetrically: eyes at the halfway point of the head, and nose-to-brow, brow-to-hairline, and nose-to-chin thirds all measure equal
- Cast shadows have hard, sharp edges while form shadows fade softly, and mixing up the two edge qualities is what makes shading look flat
- Puncturing a kneaded eraser with a pencil tip and dabbing it onto graphite creates a stippled texture effect for skin or surfaces
Best for: Intermediate pencil artists who already sketch but want a systematic, anatomy-based method for accurate, realistic portraits.
This is a genuinely instructional, technique-dense course: Brickey demonstrates concrete measuring methods, plane-based shading logic and feature-by-feature anatomy rather than just narrating a finished drawing. Its 71 minutes are packed tightly, so absolute beginners with no prior sketching experience may find the pace and the terminology (planes, form shadow, core shadow) assumes some existing drawing vocabulary. Best used as an active, pause-and-practice reference rather than passive viewing.