Sketching hair is dictated by several aspects: the type of hair, its color, texture, amount, the arrangement and styling of the hair, the individuality and disposition of the sitter or the photograph, and the light effect upon the hair.

The arabesque of the hair is part of the overall construct. A correct arabesque is relevant to the likeness of the hair. Many novice artists begin with the face and grow outward from there. This is however a bad approach and instills bad habits that will prove hard to break.

In fact, the arabesque is especially critical when sketch a coiffure. Attempting to draw the hair working from the inside out, bit by bit, is a recipe for disaster. The hair will result in being either too small for the skull or too large.

Working within the arabesque of the hairdo, first put in the primary darks. These darks are best seen by squinting down your eyes until a general pattern of light and dark is seen.

Next, you need to blend the graphite in a painterly fashion following the overall gesture and movement of the hairdo. For this you can utilize your fingers, a tissue, or a paper stump. If you make use of a paper stump be cautious not to dull the look. If you make use of your fingers make sure they are dry and also wipe them constantly with a paper towel.

Then, utilize your kneaded eraser like a loaded paint brush to lift out the important lights. Do not be overly finicky here. A more bravura approach creates a sense of life and rhythm into the coiffure. If you make a mistake just stump down the graphite again with your fingers or stump and do it again.

Sometimes when you block-in the coiffure other light parts of the skull pop out. This is one rationale why working the head as a whole is necessary.

French braiding is a beautiful coiffure style, but extremely complicated and hard to sketch. The purpose is to draw these French braids fluidly and with movement. A balancing act is required here: the complexity of the hairdo’s styling is best handled by first line-rendering the main locks and braids. As you lay out the braids make certain to plumb and carefully size and situate each important lock and braid.

When drawing from a photograph there is the temptation to reproduce it down to the smallest detail. You may or may not give in to this pull but you should always make sure that the coiffure maintains its liveliness. However, in most cases, you will not need to draw every detail.

Further block-in the darks taking into account the direction and gesture of the important locks of the hair. The hardest thing is to refrain from plunging into an area of detail. Not to do this requires mental discipline. Best is to follow a layered approach that progressively stacks the arrangement of the coiffure, lock by lock.

You also should soften the edges of the coiffure line so that it blends into the forehead and sides of the face. Hair does this naturally.

Be sure to used sharp pencils because dull pencils lead to dull, dead coiffures.

Having first mapped out and hatched-in the essential locks of hair makes the sketching of the finer regions much easier, but is still labor intensive. You should be prepared to spend quite a lot of time on a hairdo.

Also, keep stepping back from the sketch to preserve an overview of the principal light/dark pattern because detailing can result in a flat mess in which the tones close in on each other.

Hold back from sketching bangs too early in the process. This helps ensure that the hairdo and flesh can be unified into a coherent sense of spirit.

Sketching hair so that it reads naturally and has a rhythmic gesture is hard. Generally it takes as much time and effort to render the hair as it does the face and neck. You must spend as much care in preparing the hair as you would for the remainderof the portrait. If you draw from life make sure you do the hairdo before your model takes a rest because the coiffure will very likely have changed when the break is over. The idea, then, is to devote a whole 20 to 30 minutes of a pose segment to the coiffure.

With these instructions you can be certain that in time your sketched coiffures will look authentic and lively. Do not forget that rendering coiffure takes time so that you do not get impatient.

Do you want to learn the secrets of pencil portrait sketching? Download my brand new free pencil portrait drawing tutorial here: portrait drawing course.

Remi Engels is a pencil portrait artist and oil painter and practiced drawing teacher. See his work at pencil portraits.

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Value is one of the most troublesome elements of portraiture. Most artists are very reluctant about value and do not push the darks far enough. This is often because:

1. Their eyes are not yet taught to see the subtle gradations.

2. The fear of losing a sketch.

Beginning artists can see big lights and big darks and halftones easily enough but it takes eye-training to see the finer gradations in value.

In this article we will focus on the interplay of strong unconventional lights and darks that are cast upon the model’s head, i.e., light-dappled patterns.

As usual, we first draw the arabesque and situate the facial features (brow line and base of the nose).

When dealing with a complex tonal pattern the key task is looking to simplify the patterns. Sketching, in general, is always an exercise in simplification, i.e., making choices.

The next step consists of hatching-in the overall dark/light pattern with simple tones. At this stage do not yet refine the tones because doing so will surely lead to disappointment.

Using a stump or your fingers, blend the pencil dust. If you use a paper stump be careful not to deaden the values. The lights can be added, corrected, and refined with your kneaded eraser.

The facial area and the hair are now carefully drawn in.
Keep these structural lines very light. Also, continue constructing the tonal forms keeping in mind that, except for the sun-dappled pattern, the value must be suppressed, i.e., nothing in the darks must stand out.

This is a subtle balancing act. Tone must be added and then delicately modeled and/or taken away. This is an exercise in going back and forth.

In addition, do not be tempted to finish the facial features but be sure that the likeness is already there and that the proportions are correct. That is, at this time, your drawing should look like an under-painting.

Like color, value is influenced by the neighboring value. You can see, for instance, that once the hair is blocked-in and somewhat refined that the facial area now looks lighter than before.

Next, you can return to the facial area and break down the large tonal forms into their various shapes and relationships by using hatching, stumping and delicate eraser work.

The test with dappled light is to make the delicate patterns while still keeping an interconnected full. As a general rule, cast shadows have hard edges while form shadows have soft edges of changing degrees. When using a stump, you should barely tap the paper. This allows you to maintain the tiny lights that reflect off the paper thereby keeping the image alive and vibrating with light.

To produce the most subtle tones use the blackest, hardest pieces of kneaded eraser you can find.

As is the case with the facial features, the values of the hair must be subordinated to the overall light and must harmonize with the face both physically and emotionally.

Lastly, at this time you can leave the drawing as is or you can push it further by adding more detail. That is an artistic decision left to you.

Do you want to learn the secrets of pencil portrait sketching? Download my brand new free pencil portrait drawing course here: pencil portrait tutorial.

Remi Engels is a pencil portrait artist and oil painter and skilled sketching teacher. See his work at graphite pencil portraits.

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For untutored artists the difficulty with seeing lies in the conflict that exists between the actual visual reality of an entity
and the way the mind attempts to represent our perception of this reality on the sketching paper. This trial invariably involves the tendency to draw our iconic preconception instead of the concrete reality.

Symbolic preconceptions are part of a subconscious visual lingo that uses symbols to characterize known items. This lingo of icons evolved as a mechanism to help us survive as a species. These icons help us, for example, to instantly recognize food sources or treacherous predators.

When we note an unknown entity our involuntary mind instantantly tries to form a new icon to characterize and store the item in memory. Often novice artists will more correctly sketch unknown objects than known ones because they are not yet wedded to the new icons.

However, when they attempt to sketch the same item a second time, it is likely that a more iconic picture will emerge because ready to use symbols have already been stored in the mind.

Consider, for example, the word “head”. Straight away an picture comes to mind that is iconic for the head. Unfortunately, this symbol is only a symbolic picture of a head and is always a gross simplification of a real head. Nevertheless, there is a strong subconscious pull to draw the symbol instead of what we actually see.

It is this conflict that artists must learn to conquer. This is particularly a difficulty for pencil portrait artists. When drawing a portrait the artist must resolve numerous layers of icons to obtain a realistic effect.

We now will illustrate a very good exercise to learn to overcome the problem of schematic sketching.

We will be sketching from an upside-down picture. This way our schematic preconception of the head is interrupted. We will be forced to draw without our symbols. The result will be a purer sketching experience free from a contaminated observation.

As you draw the lines and hatch-in the values you will feel quite ill at ease in your drawing. This is a good thing. Do not be concerned with the quality of your sketch. This is an exercise in seeing.

When practicing line and value this way, beginning artists often get better results than from the right-side up way. Trust yourself and throughout the exercise only look at your paper image in the upside-down position even though it may feel quite uncomfortable.

You will learn to see and draw tone as shapes and will be able to break down hard edges into short, straight lines instead of the common symbols your mind will assign to the nose, the ears, etc.

Thinking of and naming perceived items will lead you down the garden path of oval shaped eyes, two holes for nostrils, a bunch of lines for hair, cauliflower ears and something that looks like an M sitting on a bowl for a mouth instead of what is actually there.

Artists will never be free of iconic set. The schematics actually change and become more sophisticated. It is only by constantly analyzing and abstracting form that we are able to draw realistically.

Do you want to learn the secrets of pencil portrait sketching? Download my brand new free pencil portrait drawing course here: pencil portrait tutorial.

Remi Engels is a pencil portrait artist and oil painter and skilled drawing teacher. See his work at graphite pencil portraits by Remi.

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There are many modes of sketching: linear, value-wise, gestural, etc. In this expose we will center on carving out shape with a sculptural feeling.

This manner of sketching is very much like working with clay except that we are drawing on paper, of course, and using our fingers, a stump, tissue, and the putty eraser as our sculpture tools.

As always, begin with striking the construct and placing the basic sizes of the facial area.

Before blocking-in the main light/dark patterns you should squint and look at the model or the photograph. Squinting distills the lights and darks into simple patterns of one given tone because it obscures the details.

At this point, just concern yourself with the large masses, maybe even just two, a light one and a dark one. Do not yet attempt to break down the darks at this point.

Drawing in this way is also excellent training for painting because this is how you build up a painting particularly when using the Alla Prima method of painting.

Sketching, painting, and sculpture are subtractive/additive enterprises. You first add something and then you take something away, all the while proceeding towards the finished drawing.

You also will use your putty eraser to carve out the lights. When doing this pay careful attention to the anatomical structures; every shape indicates a muscle landmark.

We all have our individual preferences about how we draw. At this point, you may prefer to refine the arabesque and hone in on the facial features. Other artists will go on working value-wise without any line drawing. As you gain experience and grow as an artist you will make your own choices. That is what art making is: choices - bad and good.

Now that we have the essentials down including the overall proportions, we can start resolving the darks and the lights. The purpose is to go for the “full stretch” of values, i.e., from the darkest darks to the lightest light.

Beginning and intermediate artists often fail to go for the full tonal stretch. Quite often the reason for this is the fear of ruining their drawing and also because they have read, or been told, not to overwork the drawing.

As a beginner you should take a sketch as far as you possibly can, even to the point of collapse. That way you will learn exactly how far you can go. If you always finish short you will never know what lies ahead.

Use your fingers, a tissue, and a stump to blend the values. The best thing is to start dividing each large tonal mass into two separate smaller masses of different tones wherever your observations tell you there is a difference in tone to be made. Keep in mind the varying planes and the anatomy of the subject’s features.

The hair is kept dark and simple with only a few strokes of the putty eraser to suggest the unkempt locks of hair. Do not overdo these strokes or they will look blanched.

In closing, when employing the sculptural manner of drawing a pencil portrait always treat your tools as if they were brushes. Imagine as much as possible that you are sculpting instead of sketching. Always remember the anatomy and the varying plane bearings that you observe in your subject. Always sketch from the general to the specific or from the large to the small. As you get more expertise, try to remember the things that work for you and incorporate them in your style of sketching.

Do you want to learn the secrets of pencil portrait drawing? Download my brand new free pencil portrait drawing tutorial here: portrait drawing tutorial.

Remi Engels is a pencil portrait artist and oil painter and practiced drawing teacher. See his work at pencil portraits.

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