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Founder of Proko, artist and teacher of drawing, painting, and anatomy. I try to make my lessons fun and ultra packed with information.
LESSON NOTES
In this project, we will practice measuring with a portrait drawing. Accurate proportions are essential for capturing a likeness. We'll break the process down into steps, starting with the biggest shapes and working our way down to the small details. I’ll also show you the various measurements and strategies I use when going through this process.
Join us in the premium course to get access to this lesson, full lesson notes, assignments, demonstrations and critiques!
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ASSIGNMENTS![]()
![@erinbentley]()
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![Myra Lemmond]()
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![@youkon]()
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![Stig Johannson]()
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![Araphel]()
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![Nickdulis]()
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![Tamir Bahar]()
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![Melanie Scearce]()
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![Myra Lemmond]()
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![Patrick Bosworth]()
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![Alex]()
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![Melanie Scearce]()
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![@na_talie]()
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![rheannon]()
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![@ljgrimm]()
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![Rain Kipper]()
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![Gabriel]()
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![Gabriel]()
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![@jjpowell92]()
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![Turbo Fish]()
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![@coldemptyvoid]()
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![Melanie Scearce]()
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![@irenemarceline]()
Deadline: Submit your assignment by 07/25/2023 for a chance to be featured in the next critique video!
Use the reference photo and all the measuring methods you learned in the previous lesson to practice drawing a portrait with accurate proportion.
Keep in mind that your layin will get harder as you move from big shapes to smaller details. Don't draw too small, otherwise the shapes of the features will be too small and harder to draw accurate. Keep the photo next to or in front of your paper to avoid distortion.
Expect a careful layin to take about an hour. Don't rush. Worry about accuracy, not time.
Remember - big to small, use straight lines, measure units, double check, find plumb lines, judge angles. Try to have fun!
Level 2, you're doing the same thing for this one. This exercise doesn't change no matter what your experience level is.
The Musketeer photo reference is from the Musketeer Model Pack by Grafit Studio
I think mine looks ok but it was really off in some places (esp. his right cheekbone/side of face) after doing the overlay! I will have to practice more on this one. (By the way I taped two pages together haha)
Looking for feedback on this. Here's another try. I overlayed in and saw that the ear wasn't stretched out enough, must have been a measurement error.
I found this exercise to be demoralizing. I get that it's probably more about the proportions, but I do not have the foggiest idea on how to make a face a face, an eye an eye, a nose look like a nose etc. I am very much a beginner and trying to draw a portrait without any sort of training did not go well...
Good job for a first attempt. It's best not to think about that exercise as drawing a portrait, but, as you said, working on getting the proportions (position, shape, size and angle of features relative to each other) right through making rough measurements . Drawing facial features correctly can be worked on separately. A handy thing to do is to paste both your attempt and the original image into a program like Krita and reducing the opacity of one of the layers to see how closely they match, as below. I bet if you make a few more attempts over the next month or two, you will improve significantly. Unfortunately, there's not much that can be done about looking at your own work and finding it demoralizing except recognising that the demoralized feeling just means that you have found something that you need to practice.
i really hate drawing portraits because i get obsessive with measuring, spent like an hour one just measuring the first assignment and then rushed through it out of frustration, eyeballed the other two demos while watching. then finally decided to do it proper and did some plumb lines and measuring in photoshop, eyeballed it and then compared while drawing. was really fun by the end and happy i didn't just skip through.
So... its time...
The accurate measurements. My bane of existence. Had to force myself to do it. Been semi avoiding this for decades. Always sucked at it.
Result: I hate it. I hate so much that everything must be measured. everything has to be exactly perfectly correct.
Parts of are technically right, like left side of the face. or if you move the overlaid reference to check, the right side is correct. But together? Nah it all wrong. Nose is way too long, among other things that are wrong size.
I got lost in the sauce pretty fairly early on. Didn´t help having Stan´s measurements from the video in front of me.
I am just lost and don´t know how to practice this to get better. I am fine with eye balling and getting the idea of a subject across but moment it has to be exactly precise I feel like facing the executioner.
In the past I tried all kinds of measuring ways, like grid etc. Nothing worked.
Just what the hell am I doing wrong?
This one was scary... Finally gave it a go.
This was ~50 minutes.
After playing with the overlay in an image editor, it seems that I got _some_ proportions right, but in pieces. So I can make one part align, but that throws off the others.
Gonna have to keep practicing this...
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7d
Yeah, you got the facial features pretty good. Most of the vertical proportions are there, although the chin/beard got a bit too long. It's mainly the horizontal proportions that didn't quite just justified, so just keep that in mind moving forward. This is one of those things that just takes repetition to master. Keep it up!
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9d
Nice work! Looks like you're getting the idea, and you have a really nice lay-in started here! Something to keep in mind is the overall size you're working. It might feel counter intuitive at first, but it's actually easier to accurately measure your proportions/units when you're drawing at a larger size so you might want to try scaling up your drawing on your next attempts. Ron Lemen recommends starting a portrait at around the size of your hand from the tip of your longest finger to the base of the palm, so if you place your hand flat on the page and mark off the length of your hand, that's a good point of reference for the overall portrait size. Hope this helps, keep up the good work!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QIqskl9iGoE
Phew this was tough! I thought I did a pretty good job (on my admittedly second attempt, first was shit), but making an overlay afterwards showed me I was actually really off. Not sure what specifically I should do better except practice.
If I had to guess though I would say misjudging angles caused proportions to deviate and ended up skewing the whole image to the left. this started from the forehead on the top left. On to the next one!
BTW for you iOS users out there: a quick, simple, and free app is called Overlay.
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11d
Really great advice from Natalie about the general shapes feedback loop, and yes, this is one of those skills that requires consistent practice to hone your eye. For the angles, I like to hold my pencil up to the reference between two points to get a feel for the degree of the angle.
It gets better, if you keep practicing. You can also speed that up by making the overlay when you are done with the biggest shapes. That way, your feedback loop is faster. With the correct foundation, it is much easier to place the smaller shapes correctly and the rest improves, too.
Proportions and perspective are the main reasons I bought this course so this was a big challenge. I ended up making a bit of a grid for the musketeer by dividing my width and extending plumb lines but tried to just use pencil measurements for the demo image. Overlaying them gave me a lot of insight to where I went wrong and will definitely practice this process more. My third attempt, ironically, before overlaying, I made some ‘by eye’ adjustments like the jaw which after overlaying, I realised were better before I made the changes! I didn’t trust my measuring enough hah
Take one and take two. I was super stressed about this exercise but actually felt pretty good about it in the end. The mouth is still too high, but the eyes, hate, ears, chin, and coat are good when I overlay them in photoshop.
Tracing the chin location was a bit too difficult, so i tried to trace the beard and took it as a base shape. The feedback method helped a lot!
Here's mine. Spent about 1h-1h20min measuring and marking down mesuraments and still think the face turned out too thin and tall compared to the reference... Also I think I forgot the subtle tilt the features have... I do think I learned a lot tho, looking at where things are compared to each other to get the proportions right feels really good when you notice a big one. But definetly need to practice a lot more
I also unfortunetly did not have bigger paper like it was reccomended and could not find them for an affordable price in my area :(
I stumbled through this so badly, and I kinda gave up when I got to the smaller details, but I am SO pleased at how this turned out. Every time I draw a face, it just ends up looking so goofy, and this is the first time I've been able to look at the drawing and the reference and feel pretty good about it. I think I've learned that proportions are my biggest weakness right now, and I'm REALLY bad at eyeballing it, so I think I'm going to need to spend a lot of time doing this over the next few months so that I can really start training my eyes. It sounds like a ton of work, but I think it'll be worth it.
Level 1 took me 1 hour, and level 2 and 3 took me another hour. Found it considerably harder to be consistent at level 3 because it seems that when you are working on small scales, small mistakes compound to big issues
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24d
Nice work! Just a few tweaks with the facial features- eyes, nose, mouth, forehead and you’ll be pretty nearly perfect with your measurements.
This could have gone a lot worse! Never could have reached this result without following Stan’s instructions letter by letter. I was very intimidated by this project but it was mostly in my mind! Can’t wait to improve so I can make portraits for people :) the largest paper i had was this very grainy one which, after getting used to the smooth sketchbook, was a bit hard to control 😅
