How to Draw People

Lee Hammond's book, Draw Real People, includes directions on shading, using grids and proportions, and everything else you'll need to learn to draw people in no time. If you'd like to draw people, pick up a copy of Draw Real People today!

Fortunately for beginning artists, the journey of a thousand portraits begins with a single simple line: the gesture or "action" line, which shows which direction the body is moving and can be compared to the spine of your subject. In fact, for some artists, the gesture line really is just the location of the spine. Other artists will make the gesture line so long as to encompass the whole body from head to toe, but the general idea is the same.

To practice finding gesture lines:

• Find some reference photos of people in poses you'd like to draw. Practice drawing a single smooth line which goes through most of the pose (see the pictures above for some examples).


• Watch how other people move when you're at work/school, shopping, etc. Observe how the spine usually stays in a single smooth curve no matter how complex the pose is, and pay attention to how their limbs go with or against the curve of the spine.


• Practice drawing stick figures (cartoon characters, real people - depending on your skill level) starting with a gesture line and branching out to include the head and limbs.

When drawing people, it's important to draw everything at the right sizes. As a result, many books on how to draw people include charts to show where important proportions are.

The size of a character's head is often used as a unit of measurement. By altering these proportions, you can change the style of an image. Realistic characters are six or seven heads tall. Superhero comic book characters are eight or more heads tall. Little chibi characters are only two or three heads tall. Children also tend to have large heads in comparison to the rest of their bodies, making them only four or five heads tall.