How I got FASTER at PORTRAIT DRAWING

in this video i'm going to be doing a portrait sketch of a model that i've worked with for a really really long time the lighting situation that i've chosen is really specific the light kind of comes a little bit from everywhere so it's really strong ambient light situation and that makes it particularly suitable for the kind of drawing that i want to do which is for me a very fast drawing i would refer to this as a pencil sketch i know that in the broad church that is the portrait community of the world two hours that i took to make this drawing is maybe not fast in your opinion but for me two hours is kind of the baseline for me getting something realistic to show up on the paper in a way that i feel like is at least or could be considered you know a finished sketch [Music] now it's important also to understand the context of this when i was a student i remember probably the longest drawing that i did like the drawing that i spent the absolute most time on took me a term and a half be about 16 weeks i was drawing on that drawing for three hours a day five days a week and then because i was conscientious i'd probably go in on the weekends as well but this cast drawing took me absolutely forever i was ready to quit on it a dozen times and because i was at this particular school where quitting on the drawing was not a thing i just kept at it again and again and again and again and again until i achieved what i think really is a pretty good result eventually though for me it was really interesting to try to come to a result faster because we're impatient i have a million pictures that i want to make and i don't have 175 hours to make every single one of them so the idea of like learning to sketch quickly was really attractive to me but i was horrible at it for many many years it was the worst part of my drawing toolkit was actually being able to do a sketch it's not going to be focused on values of course because values are the one thing that i find especially in graphite drawing that don't come fast now if you're going to be working in charcoal or another medium of course you can get rich dark values a lot quicker than you can in graphite but for me graphite is where i wanted to be and so i stick to the the restraints that that has what i try to do when i'm pencil sketching is actually to focus more on form and structure and planes rather than value statement right tip number one to you is if you want to draw something fast try to choose subjects that don't have a huge black and white value statement now a big part of speeding up your drawing process is just becoming more efficient we can only physically draw so fast but what i try to do in my process is to not repeat steps one of the most important steps that you can take in becoming more efficient is to become confident in each stage of the drawing so that means confident in the block in phase confident in value application and confident in rendering all these require different skill sets i happen to find that the structure oriented block in stage is the one that is probably the most challenging to learn but also the most rewarding in terms of speed if you want to learn more about that stage you can check out my youtube videos and also the course that i'm developing on patreon called block in boot camp the next concrete tip that i can give you is to try to stick to one medium if you want to accelerate your progress the last thing you want to do is go like shifting the goal posts every time that you make a new drawing so switching to colored pencil then to gouache then to graphite then pen and ink all of these different mediums have different tendencies different trends different things that that make them useful or make them difficult and so if you're switching in between mediums every time you're going to have a steep uphill climb towards making that that progress in efficiency bear in mind i'm not talking here about how to grow as an artist because different mediums can be absolutely fascinating and i'm somebody that throughout my career has used just about everything that you can get onto a paper or a canvas at one time or another i'm talking here about speeding up your portrait drawing process period a saying that's really stuck with me over the years ever since i heard it is this work expands for the time available now i've seen this happen in real time in art studios in that i've had as a student open-ended projects meaning i could take 100 hours or i could take 15 hours in those circumstances it almost always takes the longest time that it can possibly take for these projects if you want to give yourself that extra little bit of motivation you can actually set a timer give yourself two hours to make a drawing whatever happens at the end of that two hours you sign off if you do feel like this might add a little bit of stress to your life or you might not uh be comfortable working within that time period of course you don't have to do it i'm just recommending it because i think it's something that reminds you that the first minute that you spend drawing is just as precious as the 120th the takeaways from this video should be though that if you want to speed up you need to become specific about what you want to take out of each individual stage in the process if you had 120 minutes what would you do for the first 15 if you could only do them in that time because what we want to avoid at all costs is repeating ourselves right if i search for proportions in the beginning i don't want to still be searching for those same proportions 120 minutes in so i need to find a way to be a little bit more certain at first and that means niching down in terms of what you're focusing on at different stages of the drawing i would also strongly recommend that if you want to make a concerted effort towards making that progress and getting faster stick to a single medium to do it i chose graphite it doesn't have to be graphite it can be literally any drawing medium out there and finally let's lower that barrier of entry don't expect that your first 5 10 15 20 drawings are going to be any good this is going to be you in total fish out of water scenario where you're not used to drawing fast you're not used to sketching in this way and you need to acclimate yourself to that environment and that process it's a whole big thing and it takes a little bit of time to get there so that's all for this video thank you all so much for watching please remember to like and subscribe and if you're really interested in learning about drawing and painting representational stuff you can always go to my patreon page there's tons and tons and tons of lessons specific to what we're talking about here there is the block in boot camp tier and this is all about actually getting better with those first stages in drawing anyway take good care of yourselves and i'll see you next time

Channel: Stephen Bauman

Views: 77,232

Keywords: Bauman, Stephen Bauman, Bauman art, Painting Tutorials, Learn to Paint, Painting Tips

Id: t5pOC3jDXx4

Length: 7min 34sec (454 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 13 2022