Learn How to Draw a Female Portrait!

Here is where we learn drawing a female portrait by applying what we know about the human head and the female face.

The beauty of the digital medium is that you can always correct your portrait drawings at any time. That means you can focus on learning instead of worry about making mistakes that could undo all your efforts.

To start off, you should at least be familiar with how to construct the head and all of its proportions from the previous lessons.

With a clear understanding of the head, we are going to focus more on shading and lighting techniques to bring your simple sketches to life.

1. The gesture drawing

You first need a gesture drawing of your subject. On a new layer, start drawing an outline of the person you are drawing.

Drawing femlae portraits, and any other drawings for that matter, will require you to get the proportions and rough details correctly.

Remember all the points of the head and how you would divide it. Personally, I went a little bit further and added some additional movements like having her hand hold onto her hair.

If your subject is tilted a little, think about how the facial features will reflect it.

As I am comfortable with drawing a female portrait, I am able to create a person with just a few references (the person in this illustration is made-up).

That is, I looked at a few poses, clothing, and hairstyles that I want to put together and then visualize this particular cartoonish type gesture drawing.

Everyone has different strengths and stuff they need to improve on. You do not have to make up your own person. Instead, it's ok to grab a live model or a model from a magazine.

As long as you place all the facial features correctly in the right spot, you're that much closer to drawing a convincing portrait.

2. Blocking in depth

Having done your gesture drawing, the next step is to block in some tonal value. You want to roughly look at where the light hits the face to give it the right facial features.

Start by painting your entire gesture drawing with a neutral grey tone. This is important in drawing a female portrait because it gives you a good base to sculpt from.

There are four primary areas that require you to paint large light blotches: the forehead, the cheeks, the chin, and the nose.

On the reverse side of things, you need to paint dark blotches for where the eyes, lips, and the neck. That way, you are working on the whole composition all at once.

The trick here is to let light and shadows create the overall shape of the head and face while your gesture drawing gives you a guideline on where to paint the facial features.

When you think you have a rough idea of your subject, you can move onto the next step of adding details in the art of drawing a female portrait.

3. The details in drawing a female portrait

You will probably spend a lot of time on this step. Your three basic digital art tools here will be the smudge brush, the eraser, and the painting brush.

There are two specific digital brushes you need to switch between. Hard chalk brushes can help you block in additional details while soft round brushes will create good shading transitions.

All the while, you need to be using your eyedropper tool to sample the colors on the canvas as a quick way to pick up the right colors.

Anyway, the first think you should do is start smudging your composition. Again, use a hard chalk smudge brush initially, but switch to round smudge brushes to get better shading effects.

Try not to smudge out too much detail as will use your gesture drawing to create more details.

For example, you can switch to a small smudge brush and create eyelashes where your gesture drawing of the eyes are.

Then, switch to a small painting brush to start adding additional details like the reflections in the pupils and lips.

The same digital drawing and painting techniques can be done for the rest of the body features. You may also want to create shadows on the ends of the mouth, lower lips, and ear openings.

Don't forget the rim light on the lower chin. This will outline your face and make it stand out in comparison to the neck.

As well, you need to use the eraser tool to refine the outline of your subject. Use a large chalk brush to erase any gesture drawing lines that are out of place and to create additional hair effects.

4. Finishing female portrait touches

After smudging in shadows and adding in details, your portrait should look fairly complete at this point. Yet, it feels like it's missing something.

Indeed, what you worked on is simply creating the details the best you can to resemble your subject. To bring it to life even further, you need to work on where the light will hit your subject.

First, you need to decide where your light will hit. On most portraits, the light source is usually at the top left, top right, or top center.

However, you can choose where you want to put your light source so long as you understand how to create the shadows found in that location.

If you have your portrait in several layers, now is the opportunity to group it or merge it all together. What you are going to do now is create a new layer on top of your portrait.

From there, set the opacity level to about 50% and begin painting light and shadows on that new layer. This way, you won't lose any details as well as backtracking shadows that do not look right.

Continuing on, use a large round brush to paint large areas of light and shadow. This glazing effect will tone down any cartoonish lines while bringing your portrait to life.

Use a small brush to work on additional details such as eye bags, light reflected off the lips, the shadows underneath the nose, hair details, etc.

Sometimes, you may want to go back to your portrait layer and improve on the details in case the layer with the shading effects does not bring out the details correctly.

Just let your eyes wander over the entire composition and correct any mistakes that you see!

It's ok to spend time on drawing a female portrait if it's your first time. While the example here is done in roughly 30 minutes, it may take you a lot longer to finish your portrait.

With time, experience, and the lessons on this site, you will get to that point as well!

I hope you enjoy this simple lesson on drawing a female portrait and look forward seeing to your digital drawing submissions!

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