Learn How to Draw - Portrait Drawing Step by Step

French braiding is a beautiful hair style, but extremely complex and the devil to draw. Our agenda is to render these French braids fluidly and with movement. A balancing act is required here: the complexity of the hair’s styling is best handled by ‘mapping out’ the main locks and braids. As you ‘map out’ be sure to plumb and carefully size and place each main lock and braid.

When working from a photograph there is the beguiling temptation to ‘copy’ it down to the smallest detail. That decision is best laid to each artist’s intent. However, for the drawing to be successful it must have a sense of life to it. Don’t be so maniacally obsessive that your drawing drops dead.

I ‘map out’ only as much as I need to. In most cases, you will not need to map out to this extent – I am hard pressed to think of a more complex hair style than French braids. Although long curly hair cascading over the shoulders can be quite demanding too.

Using a soft 8B pencil further block in the darks paying attention to the direction and gesture of the major locks of hair and blocking in only shapes of darks where there are many minor locks.

The most difficult thing is to refrain from plunging into an area of detail. This requires both mental discipline and faith. Once again I stump down using my fingers like paint brushes – short, stubby paint brushes. And, again, using a kneaded eraser I paint out the lights. This is a layered approach that progressively stalks the arrangement of the hair lock by lock. You’ll notice, too, that I have softened the edges of the hair line so that it blends into the face. Hair does this naturally.