now it is time to get dirty, so grab your pencil, prepare your canvase, and get ready to start drawing.
First think you will have to keep in mind, that you are not gonna be a good artist in one night, you need to practice and .. well practice more, this is the key to become good at anything, in drawing particularly, you need to train two things, you hand, and your eyes.
lets start with training the hand :
this is where most of the beginners get depressed of; when you start drawing, your hand would not be able to draw straight and perfect lines or shapes, however, the more you train it, the more you get confident in drawing; so start by drawing simple lines, then move to more complex shapes like rectangles, hexagons etc ..., after you feel confident, you can move to draw curves and circles.
let me note here that drawing strait line is very important, it is crucial to capture the outlines of your portrait, i usually start with strokes and lines to define the face and its unique features like the length of the forehead, the position of the eyes and the distance between them, the size of the mouth and so on, in the next step i detail these lines by drawing a curved lines on top of them, then on an advanced steps, i start to shade and create the midtones.
I have created a quick example to demonstrate the use of strokes and curves to create this drawing of an imaginary character , the final drawing will looks like :
first of all i started with a light strokes to define the head scale and the facial elements, as you can see the drawing is rough, the strokes are not accurate with no details yet , just a rough sketch to capture the head :
then i started to put some details by reshaping the head , neck and define the other facial elements like hair, eyes, mouth ..etc by drawing more new accurate strokes on top of the old light ones :
next it is time to start drawing curves and give the final look of the portrait, create the shadows, highlight, and the midtones of the face so it will look something like this :
finally i smoothed the strokes and add a rim light just to quickly demonstrate how lightning can dramatically change your portrait and give it more realism ( i will talk in more details about this subject in the future ) :