In Focus: Portrait Class Makes Drawing A Face Easy

There’s more to drawing a face than just making a circle and adding two dots for the eyes. It may seem hard for the average drawer, but believe it or not, anyone can pick up a pencil and sketch their mom, dad, siblings, friends or even themselves.

While pointing towards her face, Diamond Knispel says, “we’re going to figure out how to put it on to a piece of paper and then shade it to look like it’s real.”

Knispel is an art instructor at the Headwaters School of Music and Arts. She started drawing portraits at around 11 or 12 years old. She picked up a book from the library and the rest was history.

“I moved forward with drawing a lot of portraits through all of my teen years, and after I got bored with that and got done with it I moved onto more things and learned how to teach,” says Knispel.

The first thing you’ll need for basic portrait drawing is a picture and a grid. Then, study the face and make note of their features.

“Drawing portraits is a great way to get in tune with what reality really looks like so it gives you a good look at the face. You examine what the human face is doing, which is something that’s very common to us humans since we’re always looking at people and identifying, so it’s a way to be able to see what the face truly is,” says Knispel.

The trick is to look at the shapes in the face and not at the face as a whole.

Knispel says, “Focus on what the elements of what the face looks like: the contours, the shading, all of the techniques that it takes to get a face down which will lead back to basic drawing, so it’s kind of basic skills in the form of a face.”

Once you’ve got the basic shapes on the paper, the trick to shading is going in lightly so if you make a mistake it’s easy to fix. Like all things, practice makes perfect so keep going at and soon you’ll be a Picasso!

“I like people’s faces! I think they’re really interesting. I think it’s interesting how you get to know someone a little bit better through drawing their portrait. You get to find out how they smile a little crooked or how when they’re glaring at you they have that certain wrinkle in their eye,” says Knispel with a smile.

The deadline to sign up for the Headwaters portrait class has passed, although next month Headwaters will host a class on how to birch bark ornaments.