What most people think that you need be a good portrait artist is to be born with a gift, or have the privilege of attending an art college for several years or maybe being blessed with a photographic memory and an almost magical ability to transfer that image to paper. Yes of course anyone of those things would do the job nicely but none of those requisites are actually necessary to become an excellent pencil portrait artist. The good news is you do not have to be born an artist but you can easily learn the skills and in a relatively short time it is possible to become very proficient at drawing excellent portraits.
Regardless of the stage you have reached in your desire to develop into a successful portrait artist the most important asset you will require is a passion to succeed.
The second part is to have an open mind to learning new stuff, and then to commit to practicing that new knowledge until you are happy with the result. It is so important to keep trying, even if your efforts look poor at first, which of course they are likely to, after all while you are filling up that bin with failed efforts you are learning. This is where folk with perfectionist streaks will struggle and wrestle with a fear of failure. If you are one of those who are a bit of a perfectionist let me ask you this. How many people in your life are in fact perfect, shouldn't take too long to count them as they don't exist. So there is very little point in chasing after a non-existent goal. Here is something else for those people battling with perfectionist traits to consider. It is not unusual for some folk who only want to achieve perfection, that in the end their innate fear of failure actually motivates them to decide not to do anything at all. However if you don't enter the race in order to avoid failure then even that person who comes last has achieved so much more than you !! A final message to those would be perfectionists amongst us, it is definitely not all bad news to have that attitude, so take heart, the secret is to swap the impossible task rule of trying to be perfect to a new rule of always striving to do your best. That way you can always achieve your goal and it's kind of obvious but how could you ever do better than your best anyway. There is of course nothing to stop you trying hard to do even better in the future.
Thirdly it is important to have good understanding of the structure and the proportions of the face. It is surprising how little most of us really notice about the layout and general proportions of a face, considering we look at them every day, maybe even hundreds of them.
And fourthly, an insight into the five main components of a face, ie eyes, ears, nose, mouth and hair. The same is true here as well, in terms of the lack of precision and detail we notice of the individual parts of a face. Despite constantly looking at faces every day of our life, our normal experience is to just observe an overall picture of recognition, and most people would find it very difficult to describe another person's face in much detail. The reason behind this relates to how our brain functions, the job of the right half of the brain is to processes our images but it does it a holistic fashion at lightening speeds. Once the image has registered we tend to see what we anticipated seeing rather than a exactly what it is we are seeing. An example of that phenomena in action, is when I shaved my beard off recently that I had worn for years and some members of the family never even noticed until it was pointed out. One response was "I thought there was something different but I wasn't sure what it was".
That illustrates our natural tendency to view a lot of things in a holistic manner, so whilst the recognition is there it will naturally include an element of in accuracy. I believe it is important to be aware of this phenomena and make greater efforts in our observations in order to improve the quality and detail in our drawings.
Then finally the glue that puts this all together and brings your drawings to life is "shading" thus creating a 3 dimensional result and brings it all to life. Shading is not something that comes naturally for most of us but most certainly a simple skill that can be learnt.
How to draw a portrait