Drawing Tutorial: 3 Different Ways to Start a Portrait

Join illustrator and sketchbook artist Gabriela Niko as she gives you three simple ways to start drawing a portrait

Starting anything new can be tough and portrait drawing is no different. The blank page looks intimidating, and sketching out those first few lines to resemble something like a facial feature can feel like the hardest step of all.

Illustrator and sketchbook artist Gabriela Niko (@gabrielaniko) knows exactly how this feels. Two years ago, she discovered portrait drawing, and since then, she has been honing her skills every day. Gabriela loves the challenge of drawing the human face, and her sketches are full of life, personality, and character. As with everything in life, practice makes perfect, but Gabriela has some simple, useful tips and techniques to share that will make it easier for you to get over that first hurdle of beginning your portrait.

Join her in this tutorial as she shows you how.

3 different ways to start a portrait

1. Start with general shapes

This is perhaps the most common way to begin a portrait sketch. First, Gabriela takes an image of singer Billie Eilish as a reference. She then begins sketching the basic outline of the head and adds lines where she imagines the features will go. She draws a central, vertical line down the face to mark where the head is angled, followed by a horizontal line to mark the eye level, another for the nose, and a final one for the lips.

“Next I would try to block the area of the features,” she says, as she makes a light circle around the eye and eyebrow area, and again at the nose and lips. You don’t need to worry about any detail at this stage, but having these basic lines and shapes will give you an overall idea of layout and spacing, and provide a solid foundation on which to begin building your sketch.

2. Start with one feature

You can choose to start with any feature you feel most comfortable with, but for this exercise, Gabriela chooses the nose.

She starts by creating simple shapes, such as the nostrils, and a triangle for the tip of the nose, before blocking off areas where the light falls. She then adds what she calls “guidelines” which are essentially lines that show where other facial features appear in relation to the nose. Taking the lips as an example, she demonstrates how drawing vertical lines from the nose downwards can help show her where the lips begin and end. The same technique can be used by drawing guidelines upwards from the nose to start measuring the size and shape of the eyes.

3. Start with the negative space

Gabriela first outlines the frame of the reference photo. Then she begins by drawing the negative space around her subject. Starting from where the arm meets the frame, she marks some basic lines such as the height and angle of the top of Billie's head, and looks for shapes on the page around Billie, such as the triangle between the arm and frame.

Once she has a basic silhouette, she draws the central, vertical line of the face (similar to example 1) and adds the shapes created by Billie’s hair around her face. Finally, Gabriela marks the facial features themselves. “I’ll start to search for general shapes and more accurate lines,” she says, concentrating first on the nose—her favorite feature to draw!

Do you have any tips or tricks for starting a portrait? If so, we’d love to hear them! Just leave them in the comments section below.

If you’d like to learn the fundamentals of portraiture by learning how to draw facial features step by step and tracking your progress in a sketchbook, check out Gabriela’s online course “Portrait Sketchbooking: Explore the Human Face.”

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