How to draw people advice

How to draw people help

"How can I improve my drawing skills, especially drawing people? I have trouble getting the perspective and proportion right."

If you are mainly only having perspective and proportion problems when you draw people, the situation might be that your brain is working against you. What sometimes happens is, you are concentrating so hard on "I'm drawing a person" that it sort of distracts you and intimidates you.
The best advice I can give you is to try to realize when this is happening, and remind yourself to just LOOK FOR SHAPES.

Go for shapes and tonal values, and forget for a few minutes that it's a human being you are drawing. Just pay attention to the shapes and how they relate to each other. Look at each feature separately, concentrate on one at a time.

If you are drawing a person in a live sitting, it might help to start by drawing the outside lines (working the negative space), then work on the features one at a time, in their relationship to each other.

If you are drawing from a photograph, sometimes turning the reference photograph and your drawing paper sideways or upside down can help, because it will force you to just draw the shapes and not be distracted. I find this is especially true if I'm drawing someone I know (including myself!)...we have a pre-existing mental picture of what we 'think' that person looks like, instead of just concentrating on what we really SEE.

The book, Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain (below) by Betty Edwards is an interesting book on this subject.

I hope this has helped!
Darla