and just explain why i personally want freehand portrait skills: 1) i tested tracing/grids for this video, and i found it got me thinking flat and also i started losing faith in my own observations 2) i want to draw people from life as well as photo 3) I want to be good at faces for characters/ illustrations and being able to sculpt the forms of a face when drawing is crucial for that 4) it's just more fun 5) i like when you can feel the hand of the artist in the drawing, not just in the painting. so there are lots of methods for portraits, and the one i showed here is good for mine, but others are good for other people with other priorities. Check out our upcoming portrait course if you'd like to be able to freehand sketch faces in an expressive and fun way: www.lovelifedrawing.com/portrait-course/
Hi Kenzo, I'm in total agreement with all your ideas (rationale). I do two types of drawings 1) quantity (lots of low accuracy). 2) quality, high accuracy that I keep in my portfolios. Re grids , take too much time and I have other things to do besides draw and paint ( mundane chores , too numerous to mention). thanks for replying . Watching tutorials is more a diversion when not occupied with other activities, than a deep need for assistance. Ciao bro
There is a wisdom to your teaching that is far beyond your years. This 75 years young retired music teacher and beginner artist truly appreciates that, on so many levels.
I started the 100 Heads this week and the drawings came out nice but my Maxwell looks like a crooked old man and my Rihanna looks like Madonna, and my family think I am weird because I have been chasing them with a camera. Thank Goodness for this wonderful presentation, the pressure is off🙃
I find the whole issue of “ likeness” really fascinating. As an “ artist” that has used grids and proportional dividers quite a lot in portrait drawing from on-line images, it is amazing just how diificult it can still be to produce a likeness sufficient for a casual observer to recognise as to the subject. It is interesting as to exactly what is it about a face that provides the visual information that constitutes such a likeness ? Even very small changes can make huge impact on recognisability. Truly makes one appreciate quite how amazing is the human brain in this regard! ( certainly infinitely better than the human hand - I guess we “artists” have to be humble enough to accept that !!)
@@lovelifedrawing So true, cuz if you change the nostrils, even a bit, you might inveterately get a whole new ethnic representation to your drawing, for example, same with the eyes! It's often that critical! ;D
I'm so glad I've found your channel and really grateful for things you show there, namely unique and good quality content in terms of both visuals and advice. Hope you achieve your goals and wish you the best!
I do caricatures sometimes, and I’m always surprised by how often they capture a good likeness (at least to my eyes). I’m not sure why that happens, but I think it’s a combination of exaggerating key features and the fact that caricatures are inherently cartoony. Since the viewer isn’t expecting photorealism, getting even just approximately right can really bring out the likeness. It’s almost as if the silliness of the caricature gives you more room to hit the mark.
There actually is a very important reason why caricatures are so good at capturing likeness: it is simply because this is the way the brain handles face recognition.
yeah caricature is so interesting with regards likeness. sometimes it's useful to slightly exaggerate characteristics to help the likeness along even when not doing an actual caricature
Thank you for this great video, Kenzo, you're the rare combination of highly skilled artist and excellent teacher. I don't know if this happens to other artists as well but I tend to start out with a drawing that resembles the person and then lose the likeness as soon as I start to apply colour.
I just found your channel and its amazing! Such great way to each! It ir really hard to sometimes understand what a professional artist wants to teach but you're breaking it down beautifully for anyone to understand!
As someone preparing to create portaits of gorilla families, this video is *very* helpful. My hope is that my self-challenge will leave me with 14 portraits that will be recognisable to those familiar with the three troops (Shabani, Momotaro, D'Jeeco). Gorilla are hominids like us, so the body is a matter of tweaking muscle proportion and bone length. However, their skulls are _very_ unLoomis-able. This circle sketching is just what I need to train for 'muscle memory'. Probably wasnt ever expecting a comment like this... 😅 PS: when you said "slave to the likeness" my brain went right to Grace Jones' "Slave to the Rhythm". Haha!
Pay attention to caricature artists. Although a cartoon...they usually nail the likeness. Why? They over-emphasize features. You don't need be that obvious, but a quick look as though you're doing a caricature really helps.
hi there Kenzo - another top-notch video🏆🏆 does it really matter if an artist hides the fact that they are using certain tools to create photo likeness?? Me thinks not. Reason:- the feeling of dishonesty is in your mind not theirs (you cant change peoples minds - waste off time). Photo likeness: is such an idiotic pursuit, in my opinion, if you want to pay for super accurate art , then go and have a huge color print made for you and frame it. (super nutty in my opinion) . AS YOU SAID , and 100% correct - art is about the imperfections, exaggerations, leaving out of details - enhancing details , stretching , compressing yada yada yakety yak etc etc etc etc. VIVA artists!!!!!! May they all live long and happy lives . 🍾🥂🍺🍾🍷🥃
Most (not all) artists who trace effectively work commercially and are quite open about their practice, Neil Adams and Bill Sienkiewicz spring to mind immediately, but there is a long list of amazing artists who use projectors and light boxes to make their work. Thing is these guys have draughtsmanship that would put most of us to shame. So it’s not so much about ‘being honest’ as it is about realising that without doing your fundamentals tracing is a fast track to very boring, amateurish drawings indeed! Ergo Josh is an example of a guy who traces, and never really worked on his fundamentals, with two consequences: an over reliance on reference till he needs AI to generate it for him (with recent controversy as he had to get in front of the issue) and superficially impressive, but vapid output. He has gotten good at making his tracing look like an authentic process, but to my eyes this is very transparent. He even teaches, for profit!! Urggh! Personally I work with a hybrid Loomis Reilly construction, because I’m still working on the basics, and I don’t work as a commercial illustrator! In art school I did Fine Arts and we were always blown away by the illustration students, without realising that most of them were tracing reference! It is a tool that only works well in the hands of very advanced artists who need to meet a deadline, who need a spot on likeness for commercial reasons, and who are vastly experienced, IMO.
@@carlkligerman1981 good treatise on the subject, of "cheating", when art becomes a job, the "soul" can, unfortunately, be wrenched from it, is my "takeaway". I did not go to art school; I did pursue a satisfying science career instead, and also always did art as a recreational activity. And I never wasted my time on golf!! LOL. Now retired, I can do what I want, art-wise, without pressure of needing to produce by a deadline. I feel a bit sad for those folk!
my dials are probably similar to my life drawing dials. I want it to look good in its own right but likeness isn't my thing. id like to get proportions, edges and values right!
Nice vid, good teaching skills, and great discussion of the drawing art. And also, whether one cheats or not tracing and projecting photo images, then paints over it. And I agree they should 'fess up if they do. When I see someone's vid with a drawing already on the board down, and you did not see it being sketched, I automatically think they projected it and "cheated". I find vids of the wildlife artists are the worst offenders, in that regard, you never see them free hand drawing their subjects, just them painting it. I suppose years ago, if they had what stuff we have, today, the great artists of the day would use them. Some did early versions of it I guess; with the camera obscura, for example. I personally feel it is cheating to trace out an image that is not your own drawing, but if you did a sketch and want to enlarge it or you needed to make a painting of it and transfer it that would be ok. I did that a lot when I first painted wildlife, using grid methods, or enlarging an accurate sketch, from my small book, I did at a zoo say, of penguins, or zebras, and needed it larger, by 2X'ing it on the Zerox, then tracing it onto the board to be painted in mostly acrylic, as I did then. But my life sketches or those from my own photos were all free-handed, some good some bad. So, one must practice sketching often, since animals, like people, drawn badly, just simply Will Not Do!! And animals are just other species from us that's all. So, I'm glad I started there, with drawing/painting wildlife, since it also was my professional career, as a biologist for many years. It just seemed "natural"!! ;D Now, it makes any drawings and paintings I do of people so much easier, and for any genre really, since if I can see it, I can draw or paint it without any problem at all, whatsoever. So, in that regard I feel like an "old one", cuz actually I am now, LOL. I often "just go for it", as you said, mainly with doing portraits, and then stand back to see if it is off, and then go back and make measurements to correct any mistakes. And it's all the same process, for any painting genre, really, as I also do a lot of landscapes, studio and plein air. And, as you demonstrated, it's all just a lot of proportional measurements and angles and values and shadows etc. Eventually, you just "feel it", like the Force in "Star Wars"!! Your pencil/brush hand just seems to know what to do, ...all on its own!! LOL However, I don't know if I ever got a "likeness" of my zebras, ...but they do each have a unique "signature" pattern of stripes, and I tried to get that down, accurately!! Cheers! ;D LOL
Hey great comment thanks! I think getting to that point where you can sketch animals and people well can feel so hard but in the grand scheme of things, it’s just a few years practice and not so bad. Then you can do it for the rest of your life as you described and it’s well worth that extra effort 💪
@@lovelifedrawing Yes, it is. Life can be hard, and disappointing, often; but if you can do at least one or two things pretty well (I'm a sort of good cook, lol), then there is a reason to continue on with it!! :D
@@lovelifedrawing there is too much reference available to waste time and effort doing a "flat painting" in my opinion. Go to the Grand Canyon at high noon, and try to paint it, ....and you'll get my point!! LOL ;D
18:30 Is that cheating? No, but if you only do that you never gonna develop the skills to do it without tracing. It's like any art tool, using perspective grid isnt cheating, but its not gonna improve your free hand perspective skills
it's more concise and gets across the important ideas more efficiently, and so in that regard lends itself to youtube. full lengths demos are in our courses tho, but even there they are separate to the lessons which are more concise :)
and as i think about it, it's also because the stuff i'm teaching most is done in the first 5% of the drawing time. so this way you can dissect 2 mins of drawing for 10 minutes. there's much less important stuff happening in the later, longer stages. this means full length demos speed through the important fundamentals quite fast, then take a long time over the less important fine tuning part. good question i've not really thought about!
@@lovelifedrawing right, there are plenty of folks doing painting "demos" on you tube. Often, they are just painting along and having fun self-aggrandizing, and I personally like the scantily clad chicks, doing plein air landscapes; it's a bit of "soft porn" for dirty old me, I guess. But for art instruction and takeaways I gravitate to more adult presentations like yours. Oops did I just say "adult", ....well, you know what I mean!! LOL ;D
благодарю за видео, все Ваши видео невероятно полезны, я как раз приверженец свободного рисования портретов, буду рада узнать Ваше мнение о моем стиле @freestyle_watercolor_artist
and just explain why i personally want freehand portrait skills: 1) i tested tracing/grids for this video, and i found it got me thinking flat and also i started losing faith in my own observations 2) i want to draw people from life as well as photo 3) I want to be good at faces for characters/ illustrations and being able to sculpt the forms of a face when drawing is crucial for that 4) it's just more fun 5) i like when you can feel the hand of the artist in the drawing, not just in the painting. so there are lots of methods for portraits, and the one i showed here is good for mine, but others are good for other people with other priorities. Check out our upcoming portrait course if you'd like to be able to freehand sketch faces in an expressive and fun way: www.lovelifedrawing.com/portrait-course/
Hi Kenzo, I'm in total agreement with all your ideas (rationale). I do two types of drawings 1) quantity (lots of low accuracy). 2) quality, high accuracy that I keep in my portfolios.
Re grids , take too much time and I have other things to do besides draw and paint ( mundane chores , too numerous to mention).
thanks for replying .
Watching tutorials is more a diversion when not occupied with other activities, than a deep need for assistance.
Ciao bro
@@nakedanunnaki4432 yea tracing for likeness never worked for me, if something is off and I cant fix it, I rather start from scratch
There is a wisdom to your teaching that is far beyond your years. This 75 years young retired music teacher and beginner artist truly appreciates that, on so many levels.
Thank you that’s very kind!
I started the 100 Heads this week and the drawings came out nice but my Maxwell looks like a crooked old man and my Rihanna looks like Madonna, and my family think I am weird because I have been chasing them with a camera. Thank Goodness for this wonderful presentation, the pressure is off🙃
Good luck! Recommend switching to earthsworld or some other source of refs with strangers and give yourself a break!
I find the whole issue of “ likeness” really fascinating. As an “ artist” that has used grids and proportional dividers quite a lot in portrait drawing from on-line images, it is amazing just how diificult it can still be to produce a likeness sufficient for a casual observer to recognise as to the subject. It is interesting as to exactly what is it about a face that provides the visual information that constitutes such a likeness ? Even very small changes can make huge impact on recognisability. Truly makes one appreciate quite how amazing is the human brain in this regard! ( certainly infinitely better than the human hand - I guess we “artists” have to be humble enough to accept that !!)
Yeah and then the crazy thing is caricatures have likeness with zero accuracy. Meanwhile my drawing fails cos the nostrils are 0.5mm off 🤷
@@lovelifedrawing So true, cuz if you change the nostrils, even a bit, you might inveterately get a whole new ethnic representation to your drawing, for example, same with the eyes! It's often that critical! ;D
I'm so glad I've found your channel and really grateful for things you show there, namely unique and good quality content in terms of both visuals and advice. Hope you achieve your goals and wish you the best!
I really loved the way you explained it❤❤❤🙏🙏,
Thanks Kenzo
I do caricatures sometimes, and I’m always surprised by how often they capture a good likeness (at least to my eyes). I’m not sure why that happens, but I think it’s a combination of exaggerating key features and the fact that caricatures are inherently cartoony. Since the viewer isn’t expecting photorealism, getting even just approximately right can really bring out the likeness. It’s almost as if the silliness of the caricature gives you more room to hit the mark.
There actually is a very important reason why caricatures are so good at capturing likeness: it is simply because this is the way the brain handles face recognition.
yeah caricature is so interesting with regards likeness. sometimes it's useful to slightly exaggerate characteristics to help the likeness along even when not doing an actual caricature
I absolutely loved the video. It clicks with where I am with my portrait work and with my own ambitions. Thanks for sharing
Glad you enjoyed it!
Thank you for this great video, Kenzo, you're the rare combination of highly skilled artist and excellent teacher. I don't know if this happens to other artists as well but I tend to start out with a drawing that resembles the person and then lose the likeness as soon as I start to apply colour.
i'll try to cover colour in portraits soon :)
I just found your channel and its amazing! Such great way to each! It ir really hard to sometimes understand what a professional artist wants to teach but you're breaking it down beautifully for anyone to understand!
Thank you so much!
If portrait have less shadow its more dificult to draw
im trying to learn portrait drawing on my own. your explanation here really clicked for me. i can’t wait to try your course!
Wonderful!
As someone preparing to create portaits of gorilla families, this video is *very* helpful. My hope is that my self-challenge will leave me with 14 portraits that will be recognisable to those familiar with the three troops (Shabani, Momotaro, D'Jeeco). Gorilla are hominids like us, so the body is a matter of tweaking muscle proportion and bone length. However, their skulls are _very_ unLoomis-able. This circle sketching is just what I need to train for 'muscle memory'.
Probably wasnt ever expecting a comment like this... 😅
PS: when you said "slave to the likeness" my brain went right to Grace Jones' "Slave to the Rhythm". Haha!
Great easy explanation thank you
Thanks Kenzo, great video 😊
Glad you enjoyed it!
Great video. Thanks for sharing!🙂
Kenzo is also a celebrity from 2018 to 2024. I can't restraint myself to illustrate a portrait of him accordingly to the study group.
hey Vue hope you've been well!
Pay attention to caricature artists. Although a cartoon...they usually nail the likeness. Why? They over-emphasize features. You don't need be that obvious, but a quick look as though you're doing a caricature really helps.
Freehand sketch 😊👍
hi there Kenzo - another top-notch video🏆🏆 does it really matter if an artist hides the fact that they are using certain tools to create photo likeness?? Me thinks not. Reason:- the feeling of dishonesty is in your mind not theirs (you cant change peoples minds - waste off time). Photo likeness: is such an idiotic pursuit, in my opinion, if you want to pay for super accurate art , then go and have a huge color print made for you and frame it. (super nutty in my opinion) . AS YOU SAID , and 100% correct - art is about the imperfections, exaggerations, leaving out of details - enhancing details , stretching , compressing yada yada yakety yak etc etc etc etc. VIVA artists!!!!!! May they all live long and happy lives . 🍾🥂🍺🍾🍷🥃
Most (not all) artists who trace effectively work commercially and are quite open about their practice, Neil Adams and Bill Sienkiewicz spring to mind immediately, but there is a long list of amazing artists who use projectors and light boxes to make their work. Thing is these guys have draughtsmanship that would put most of us to shame. So it’s not so much about ‘being honest’ as it is about realising that without doing your fundamentals tracing is a fast track to very boring, amateurish drawings indeed! Ergo Josh is an example of a guy who traces, and never really worked on his fundamentals, with two consequences: an over reliance on reference till he needs AI to generate it for him (with recent controversy as he had to get in front of the issue) and superficially impressive, but vapid output. He has gotten good at making his tracing look like an authentic process, but to my eyes this is very transparent. He even teaches, for profit!! Urggh!
Personally I work with a hybrid Loomis Reilly construction, because I’m still working on the basics, and I don’t work as a commercial illustrator!
In art school I did Fine Arts and we were always blown away by the illustration students, without realising that most of them were tracing reference!
It is a tool that only works well in the hands of very advanced artists who need to meet a deadline, who need a spot on likeness for commercial reasons, and who are vastly experienced, IMO.
@@carlkligerman1981 good treatise on the subject, of "cheating", when art becomes a job, the "soul" can, unfortunately, be wrenched from it, is my "takeaway". I did not go to art school; I did pursue a satisfying science career instead, and also always did art as a recreational activity. And I never wasted my time on golf!! LOL. Now retired, I can do what I want, art-wise, without pressure of needing to produce by a deadline. I feel a bit sad for those folk!
my dials are probably similar to my life drawing dials. I want it to look good in its own right but likeness isn't my thing. id like to get proportions, edges and values right!
Same here and my number 1 priority is shape design :)
Nice vid, good teaching skills, and great discussion of the drawing art. And also, whether one cheats or not tracing and projecting photo images, then paints over it. And I agree they should 'fess up if they do. When I see someone's vid with a drawing already on the board down, and you did not see it being sketched, I automatically think they projected it and "cheated". I find vids of the wildlife artists are the worst offenders, in that regard, you never see them free hand drawing their subjects, just them painting it.
I suppose years ago, if they had what stuff we have, today, the great artists of the day would use them. Some did early versions of it I guess; with the camera obscura, for example. I personally feel it is cheating to trace out an image that is not your own drawing, but if you did a sketch and want to enlarge it or you needed to make a painting of it and transfer it that would be ok. I did that a lot when I first painted wildlife, using grid methods, or enlarging an accurate sketch, from my small book, I did at a zoo say, of penguins, or zebras, and needed it larger, by 2X'ing it on the Zerox, then tracing it onto the board to be painted in mostly acrylic, as I did then. But my life sketches or those from my own photos were all free-handed, some good some bad. So, one must practice sketching often, since animals, like people, drawn badly, just simply Will Not Do!! And animals are just other species from us that's all. So, I'm glad I started there, with drawing/painting wildlife, since it also was my professional career, as a biologist for many years. It just seemed "natural"!! ;D
Now, it makes any drawings and paintings I do of people so much easier, and for any genre really, since if I can see it, I can draw or paint it without any problem at all, whatsoever. So, in that regard I feel like an "old one", cuz actually I am now, LOL. I often "just go for it", as you said, mainly with doing portraits, and then stand back to see if it is off, and then go back and make measurements to correct any mistakes. And it's all the same process, for any painting genre, really, as I also do a lot of landscapes, studio and plein air. And, as you demonstrated, it's all just a lot of proportional measurements and angles and values and shadows etc. Eventually, you just "feel it", like the Force in "Star Wars"!! Your pencil/brush hand just seems to know what to do, ...all on its own!! LOL
However, I don't know if I ever got a "likeness" of my zebras, ...but they do each have a unique "signature" pattern of stripes, and I tried to get that down, accurately!! Cheers! ;D LOL
Hey great comment thanks! I think getting to that point where you can sketch animals and people well can feel so hard but in the grand scheme of things, it’s just a few years practice and not so bad. Then you can do it for the rest of your life as you described and it’s well worth that extra effort 💪
@@lovelifedrawing Yes, it is. Life can be hard, and disappointing, often; but if you can do at least one or two things pretty well (I'm a sort of good cook, lol), then there is a reason to continue on with it!! :D
How to draw portrait that have less shadow shape ?? Make tutorial on this topic
Good idea
@@lovelifedrawing there is too much reference available to waste time and effort doing a "flat painting" in my opinion. Go to the Grand Canyon at high noon, and try to paint it, ....and you'll get my point!! LOL ;D
18:30 Is that cheating? No, but if you only do that you never gonna develop the skills to do it without tracing. It's like any art tool, using perspective grid isnt cheating, but its not gonna improve your free hand perspective skills
Well put
❤
hey is there a reason u dont do a full demo in your videos? . all of your videos seem to be analyzing and deconstructing.
it's more concise and gets across the important ideas more efficiently, and so in that regard lends itself to youtube. full lengths demos are in our courses tho, but even there they are separate to the lessons which are more concise :)
and as i think about it, it's also because the stuff i'm teaching most is done in the first 5% of the drawing time. so this way you can dissect 2 mins of drawing for 10 minutes. there's much less important stuff happening in the later, longer stages. this means full length demos speed through the important fundamentals quite fast, then take a long time over the less important fine tuning part. good question i've not really thought about!
@@lovelifedrawing right, there are plenty of folks doing painting "demos" on you tube. Often, they are just painting along and having fun self-aggrandizing, and I personally like the scantily clad chicks, doing plein air landscapes; it's a bit of "soft porn" for dirty old me, I guess. But for art instruction and takeaways I gravitate to more adult presentations like yours. Oops did I just say "adult", ....well, you know what I mean!! LOL ;D
Look at Egon Schiele's work. Contour and line drawing quickly done, and the likeness in his portraits is very convincing.
7 minutes and you haven’t answered how.
благодарю за видео, все Ваши видео невероятно полезны, я как раз приверженец свободного рисования портретов, буду рада узнать Ваше мнение о моем стиле @freestyle_watercolor_artist