Q&A for How to Draw a Person

Look at them. My favorite technique that I learned for drawing anything, but especially as a good technique to draw portraits, is blind contour drawing. This is an exercise where you look at your subject and you cannot look at your paper or lift up your pencil while you draw. You are training your eye to talk to your hand. This is a fundamental skill that really helps with drawing portraiture in particular.

The human figure is quite challenging to draw. One method is to do warm-up poses, where each pose lasts 30 seconds or maybe a minute. This forces you to get down the essential information as quickly as possible and you won't have time to get bogged down in the details. I think it's just a matter of doing it repetitively and giving yourself the freedom to have it look like whatever it's going to look like. Whatever you see first, just follow that line and then be done and move to the next pose.

Erasing is a necessary part of art. But be careful and try not to erase too much, otherwise your drawing will look sloppy.

You don't have to. Do whatever you like with your drawing. You can shade it if you want to add more to it without coloring.

Practice sketching simple geometric shapes like circles, triangles, pentagons, and rectangles. It will take time but practice is the only way to improve. This will carry over into more complex shapes and improve your drawing skills overall.

Lightly sketch the legs and the torso, as shown above. Next, create a dress (you may need a picture for reference, just in case), overlapping the light pencil sketches. Finally, lightly erase the pencil sketches for the legs, since the legs are not shown outside the dress.

No, you do not need to shade. In fact, with simple drawings, not shading and using only block colors can make a bigger impact than a simple drawing with detailed shading. It's the "pop" factor. There are amazing artworks out there done with no shading at all. There are also amazing artworks whose attention to detail is something to wonder at. In the end, shading is your choice. You'll find your style eventually.

Start by drawing a belt around their hips, then add the sheath hanging down. The sheath is a long, stiff shape, so try starting with a triangle to sketch it. If the sword is in it, or it is heavy, the belt may be lower on the hip where the sheath is than it is in other places, so that it is diagonal across the front of the body.

It might be the type of eraser you are using; use a different eraser of good quality. Try using a white or pink eraser, do not use red or dark pink ones.