How To Draw A Pretty Good Pencil Portrait On Your First Attempt

This is a pencil drawing tutorial for beginners, attempting to show how to get from this ...

to this ...

I tried to write this in a conversational style rather than the bossy instructional format of many web tutorials. And it's all on this one page, beacuse I'm not selling anything and I don't care about "page hits".

Your first portrait might take 3-4 hours, depending on how polished you want the final drawing to look. But all the hard work is done in the first hour. After that it's shading and blending which you can do over a few days at your leisure.

Here's what you'll need -

A pencil (I normally use a 2B but it doesn't really matter)
A ruler
A sharpener
An eraser
A few sheets of paper

And in the true spirit of patronizing web-tutorials, here's a photo I took of those items, for your handy reference. Heh. In case, like, you're a moron or something and would need to refer back to it.

The paintbrush I'll explain further down - don't worry, there's no painting involved.

Seriously though, you probably hate it when online tutorials spell out every mind-numbing detail. So we won't do that here. There'll be no "First get a pencil - you can buy this in a shop". Please.

Okay let's go ...

1) Scan or photocopy a picture of the person you want to draw. For this example I'm using Salma Hayek - your subject will probably be much uglier but don't worry. It's what's on the inside that counts.

2) Use the ruler to mark out a grid on the photo like this ...

3) On the sheet you are going to be drawing on, mark out another grid. Do this LIGHTLY, you'll be rubbing it out later, and won't want grid-lines visible on the finished work.

As it's your first attempt we're using an 8x12 grid, to help you get the placement of the features correct. After you've done a few more drawings you won't need as many boxes (maybe 4x4). Eventually you might get comfortable enough to draw without a grid.

The two grids don't have to be the same size, for example if you are starting with a small photo and want to turn it into an A3 drawing you can make the boxes on your grid bigger. But keep the same number of boxes - ie if you drew a 10 X 8 box grid on the source photo you need a 10 X 8 on the drawing sheet (I'm stating the obvious. Sorry)

4) Now, referring to the grid-photo and working one square at a time, fill in the outline. Here's what you need to know :

We all have preconceived ideas about how to draw familiar shapes. We probably got it from nursery school. Eg we instinctively draw eyes and noses like this ...

You'll have to consciously fight the urge to do that here. Or your drawing will look l~~ike a pile of crap~~ cartoonish. One good way around it is to turn both sheets upside down and work that way. Just fill in the dark parts as accurately as you can. Like this ..

I usually rub out the gridlines as I work, but you can leave them in for now if you have a pointy enough eraser to be able to get at them later without erasing your work. You could be at this step for over an hour depending on how wrinkly your subject is.

A useful thing to do here is to tear a sheet of A4 in half and keep a bit under each hand so you're not rubbing against the drawing. This is to stop you from smudging it, and is especially important if you're the kind of filthy hog who sweats a lot.

5) Okay. You're over the first hurdle. You may not have a great likeness at this point though - I certainly didn't. Look ...

(Looks more like my uncle Mick)

But don't start getting depressed at the poor quality. Put away your bottle of strychnine. We're going to "hone" this and polish it up.

6) Now you need to go over the whole drawing again. This is where your hidden artistic "genius" that you didn't know you had comes into play. Rubbing out small bits and changing them slightly. You'll usually find that you made a lot of small mistakes drawing your first outline. Part of an eye might need to move up a fraction of an inch, a nostril might need a tiny change. Trust your own judgment here and make these little changes. I usually do the eyes first, then the nose, mouth and so on. Keep at it until you're satisfied. Eventually the likeness will appear. You have the basic features in place from using the grid, this is just fine-tuning.

This step is where the paintbrush is useful - to brush away the dust after you rub out something. Most people are tempted to blow the dust away, but this is a mistake. Because sooner or later you're going to accidentally launch a big gob of spit right into the middle of your masterpiece. And there is no recovering from that. It'll be even worse if you are eating a chocolate hobnob at the time. Even after it dries in, when you try to shade that part of the page it will show up darker than the rest. So use a brush, or a handful of tissue, or anything, but don't blow!

[I'm just thinking - the appearance of the words "Salma Hayek" and "Blow" might bring some unwanted traffic to this page from search engines. And those surfers are going to be mightily disappointed. They'll probably leave me some thoughtful comments though - "YUO R A LOOZR !!!!!!". I can't wait."Handful of tissue" is probably not helping here either]

Anyhoodle, I went ahead and put in some shading and blending at this stage as well. But I could (and probably should) have waited until I had the likeness correct. But what the hell? There are no strict rules, art is supposed to be an enjoyable. Just get an idea of the general method we're using here and you'll be fine.

For shading, the important thing is to take your time and do it smoothly ...

The trick is to squint at the original drawing when you're doing the shading. This lets you pick out areas of light and shadow easier. A few years of that and you'll probably end up with wrinkles around your eyes resembling the Mekong Delta, but come on - nobody said there weren't going to be sacrifices. You knew the risks when you got into this. Heh. Blending is just rubbing the shaded areas until they look smooth, and making it so the light and dark areas blend seamlessly into each other. You learn it by doing it. To do your blending, you'll need to make what we'll call "a blending Stick". Roll up a sheet of A4, stick it with a bit of tape and snip the end off into a point. Like this ...

Yeah, that photo's a bit blurry. But seriously - it's a rolled up sheet of paper, you can take my word for it. Of course you can buy proper sticks for blending if you want - "Tortillons" I think they're called. I can't say if they're any good, because I've never used them. I refuse to become a consumer of the massive soulless capitalistic tortillon corporations that blight all our lives. So I make my own. Use the blending stick to smooth the dark and light areas into each other. And here's my drawing after a bit of that ...

The likeness has improved somewhat. But nobody's going to clear a wall in The Louvre for us just yet.

7) Hair (Hoo. Yeah. What is it good for?). Sometimes drawing the hair can be difficult because of a lot of light and shadow. But in this example it was straightforward. So I just put in a darker layer and blended it a bit. If your picture has very distinct highlights in the hair, the way to approach it is to colour in the dark parts and then use your blending stick to "drag" the dark into the light. That's how you get this effect ...

However, in this picture of Salma, the highlights weren't that strong so I coloured it all in dark and used the eraser to lift off bits of light.

8 ) And so, from here I shaded the rest of it and continued making small adjustments as I went along. Over and over. Referring back to the source photo and tinkering until it started to take shape, as you can see...

9) And after that I gave it another once-over, darkening everything up...

I also darkened that last picture a little bit using photo-editing software, so it'd be easier to see on a computer screen.

And that's it. The longer you spend with the blending stick the smoother you will get it to look. If you make an area too dark, just lift it off with the eraser and smooth it out again by blending. Your friends will think you are very talented, especially if you've never done any drawing before.

Ok. Thanks for reading. I hope you found something useful in all of that.

Imaginary Questions From Readers :

- How can I take this to the next level?

First you should stop talking in that ridiculous marketing-speak. Better paper and framing are what you need here. For your first attempts you can use normal A4 photocopier paper that you stole from work, but if you want a more professional look you should get Bristol Board paper.

Get it in an art shop or order it online. It's thicker and the smooth surface makes blending really easy. I've found that Bristol Board A3 is ideal for portraits. Buy a frame slightly larger than that and get a roll of backing paper (There's probably a proper name for it) in black or grey. That will give your framed drawing a border.

- Is there any way I can earn any money drawing portraits like this?

Maybe. There are plenty of people selling these kind of drawings on eBay. Some brilliant and some dreadful. If you are dedicated enough to sit down every evening and churn out celebrity portraits you could probably make a a bit of pocket money at this.

If you're a particularly devious person you could concentrate on portraits of celebrities whom you expect to die soon - web searches and the demand for memorabilia typically shoot up when someone famous dies. What ? I'm just saying ! You certainly won't have to worry about any competition from me, I couldn't be arsed with all that effort.

Or you could do commissions. I normally charge them around 50 Euro for an A3 portrait. And I throw in a 10 Euro frame. This has me working at a little over minimum wage but I'm not bothered. Be aware that people will want the portrait done by a certain date (eg their parents' anniversary or Christmas) and they'll typically only come to you when they are out of other ideas. So prepare yourself for last minute rushing and having to stay up late or work at the weekend to get it finished in time.

- Brendan, I want to ask a question about this tutorial and/or call you a talentless jug-eared assmuncher. Where can I do that?

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