How to Draw Someone You Know, Without a Photo

Every other drawing guide on this site teaches a face. This one is about a person.

It's a different problem and most people find it out the hard way. You learn the nine strokes, you get a face you're pleased with, and then you sit down to draw your friend Priya who is leaving on Friday and the thing that comes out is a nice face that isn't her. Nothing is technically wrong with it. It just belongs to nobody.

The instinct at that point is to go find a photo and copy it more carefully. I'd skip that. Copying a photo gets you closer to the photo, not closer to her, and it takes four times as long. What actually produces recognition is a much smaller and much stranger list of things, and you already have all of them in your head.

Likeness is a shortlist, not a portrait

Think about how you describe an absent person to a friend who hasn't met them. You don't give proportions. You never once say the eyes sit halfway down the skull. You say: tall, shaved head, always in that green jacket. Three items. And the friend recognises them in the lobby on the first try.

That's the whole trick. Recognition in real life runs on a handful of high-contrast markers, not on measurement, and a drawing that carries those three markers will read as a specific human being even when every proportion in it is off.

Glasses. A fringe cut straight across. A beard. Freckles. One earring. A cap that never comes off. These are cheap to draw and enormously expensive to leave out.

Write the list before you draw anything

Do this bit with your hands off the screen. Picture the person and name the first things that arrive, in the order they arrive, and stop at four.

• Hair, as a silhouette and nothing more. Is it a bob, a fringe, tied back, gone, huge?
• Anything worn on the face. Glasses count double, and so does a permanent cap.
• Facial hair, if there is any, as a shape rather than as hairs.
• Their default expression. The face they make in a meeting when they think nobody's watching.

Then put the list in first

This is the part that reverses what most people do. Beginners build the face carefully and add the identifying stuff at the end, as decoration, once the important work is finished. It's backwards. The markers are the important work, and if they go on last they end up squeezed into whatever room is left over.

So: head, then the marker. Fringe before eyes. Frames roughed in before you decide where the eyes sit. Beard shape before the mouth. The generic parts are flexible and will happily arrange themselves around a fringe; a fringe will not rearrange itself around a pair of eyes you've already committed to.

You'll notice the drawing starts looking like them somewhere around stroke four, which is much earlier than feels reasonable.

The item people forget

The fourth one on that list is the one nearly everybody drops, and it's the one that turns a drawing of a person into a drawing of that person.

People have a resting face. Your manager's eyebrows live slightly higher than everyone else's. Your friend's mouth sits a little crooked, permanently, not because he's amused but because that's his mouth. The colleague who is somehow always halfway through raising one eyebrow.

Two dashes and a curve is the entire budget for this, and it's the cheapest likeness you will ever buy. Tilt one brow. Pull one corner of the mouth a millimetre further than the other. Leave the eyes plain.

When it still doesn't look like them

It happens, and it's nearly always one of four things. Work down the list in order, because the first one accounts for about half of all cases on its own.

• You left out a marker because it felt too obvious. The cap. The glasses. Put it in — obvious is exactly what recognition runs on.
• You drew a marker as texture instead of as a shape. Forty strands of curly hair read as noise; one lumpy outline reads as curls.
• You gave them a pleasant neutral expression instead of their own. Go back to item four.
• You're comparing the drawing to a photograph in your head instead of to the feeling of seeing them come through a door. Only one of those is a fair test, and everyone else will be applying the fair one.

Why any of this matters on a wall

Here's the situation this guide was actually written for, because it's the one we see most.

Somebody makes a wall for a person who's leaving, sends the link round, and twenty people who all know that person draw them. Nobody coordinates. Nobody sees the brief. And what shows up on the wall is twenty faces that are unmistakably one human being, drawn twenty different ways, because twenty people independently reached for the same three markers: the glasses, the cropped hair, that eyebrow.

That wall does something a single portrait can't. It isn't twenty attempts at a likeness where the best one wins. It's evidence that a particular set of people all carry the same picture of you around, and the small disagreements between the drawings are the interesting part rather than the flawed part.

Tap any face on ours and it redraws itself stroke by stroke, in the order the person made it, which means you can watch somebody hesitate over your fringe and then commit to it. There's no message box anywhere, so what you get is only ever the drawing and the time somebody spent on it. When the wall is done you can save any face as an image, a GIF or a short video to hand over.

If you're the one making the wall, one practical note: don't tell people to draw a good likeness. Tell them the three things. “He's got the round glasses and the shaved head” turns a twenty-minute struggle into a two-minute drawing, for everyone at once.