Portrait Drawing from Scratch
Portrait drawing takes patience. It takes honest looking. This work is part of a learning path — shaped by feedback, reworked carefully, built from real sessions at Pyzareth.
Where most beginners get stuck
Faces are deceptively hard. You can draw hands, still life, even figures without people noticing proportional errors. With portraits, every millimeter off reads as wrong to the human eye.
This project walks through exactly that problem: why faces look off, and what to fix first.
What the work covers
The student, Petra Volkov, started with no formal drawing background. Over 14 weeks she worked through facial proportions, the Loomis head construction method, and then moved into light and shadow using graphite pencils ranging from 2H to 6B.
Each stage included at least one portrait study from reference photo before moving forward. No skipping ahead.
The results and honest notes
Final portraits showed clear progress in likeness and confident mark-making. The hardest part was eye symmetry, which took roughly four dedicated sessions to improve noticeably.
Petra notes that progress felt slow until week eight, then suddenly visible. That timeline is fairly normal for structural drawing work.
Reference materials used
Primary references were printed portrait photos from public domain archives. The sketchbook used was 160gsm cold press. No digital tools were used in this project.