Hayley Atwell portrait

I’ve used photos as reference, obviously – I don’t have Hayley Atwell on speed dial.

I’ve been finding my portrait drawings not being as good as I want. It’s good to practice things like hands too, but I’m going back to basics with faces and heads. I’ve been studying how favourite artists approach the head. This includes Loomis method – an idealised way used for commercial and comic art. It’s quite magical following this method and seeing pretty accurate 3D heads and faces appear very quickly. Even better, it can be used for real people, to set up a life drawing or portrait sitting quickly and getting a face likeness.

Anyway, I realised I don’t have a systematic way to do portraits and generally just battle with the paint until the face looks OK. Starting fresh, I’m learning about approaches to structure, and in this example, working skin tones. It’s not my best portrait, but I was mainly following a skin tones technique tutorial. I find it useful to practice from well known people as you can find a range of images from different angles to help with understanding the 3D aspects of the face. This is ALWAYS second best to a real life sitting, but good enough for practice.