The Portrait Drawing Course (Patreon)

Welcome to our Portrait Drawing Course! This is our most comprehensive portrait drawing course ever, with a new lesson released monthly here on Patreon. Once the videos have been posted they will stay on the Patreon indefinitely so you can chose to either follow the course each month, revisit the entire course later or dip into individual lessons for ideas and advice. You'll always be able to find links to the full course on the Draw Navigator site via THIS LINK.

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About the course

Who is it for?
The course is for anybody who wants to improve their observational figure drawing, for any purpose. It is designed for people of all abilities with core exercises that are suitable for complete beginners and developed exercises for more experienced students. You can watch the first video for free HERE.

How to use the course
This course is intended to be a companion to long term learning, organised into 12-lesson terms, intended to be watched over a year with each lesson practiced over the course of a month. You are welcome to speed things up and watch more videos in a shorter time, so long as you have the time to practice plenty in between lessons. Term 1, Learning to See, can be treated as a stand-alone course or used as the introduction to the more developed 36-week course. Each month I will post a pre-recorded video lesson introducing a new idea, a related exercise to practice repeatedly over the month and an assignment for you to complete. The aim of the course is not to teach a single method of drawing but to propose drawing exercises that help you look at a person in a variety of different ways while sharing solutions that I have come across for some of the challenges that portrait drawing presents us with. If you find yourself enamoured of a particular exercise and want to spend three months riffing off of a single lesson, then that is great. You can pick the course up again when you are ready, knowing the course will still be waiting here for you. Feedback on your portrait drawing will be provided by Lancelot Richardson via our usual feedback channels HERE.

Time
Each video will last less than 1 hour and the assignments and the exercises can be practiced in a total of 2 hours. They should be repeated until you feel like you have fully explored the ideas in the lesson. The more time you are able to send practicing the processes and exercises in each video, the more you will get from the course.

Our Patreon
To learn how to draw well you need a little bit of instruction, lots of practice and a supportive community around you. With that in mind we'll have this course to provide the lessons; photo-sets, recorded poses & live poses to provide you with practice material and a community board, portrait club & social media to connect you to the rest of the Draw community. You can use the Patreon alongside in-person classes and get-togethers but if you struggle to find other like-minded students of drawing, then you can use our live sessions & social media as hub to connect with other people.

Signing up
The course is open to anybody on the Portrait Drawing, Life Drawing or Student Tier of the Patreon.

• If you're not signed up to the Patreon and are reading this, you can sign up here. The price of the course varies depending on the Tier you choose and your local sales taxes, but as a guide the Portrait Drawing tier costs £14.40 per month in the UK or £155.40 per year (10% off for paying up front). This is much less that other online portrait courses I teach because you are not paying for the course so much as supporting Draw to continue to produce these resources - I am a volunteer at Draw and the classes are made to enrich your experience of the Patreon, which supports Draw and the models & tutors who benefit from it.
• If you are already signed up to Patreon on the Supporter Tier, you can upgrade to get access - find out how to do that here.
• If you're signed up to the Patreon on the Portrait Drawing, Life Drawing or Student Tiers of the Patreon there is nothing you need to do - just watch out for the lessons as they are released!

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About the Tutors

I'm Jake - I have designed the course and I'll be delivering the course through the weekly videos and posts. I started Draw Brighton in 2009 and have the pleasure of running the live online Monday 6-8pm & Wednesday 7-8:30pm sessions each week. I've taught portait drawing for the National Portait Gallery, V&A Museum, Pallant House Gallery, West Dean College, Brighton University and many other studios. Alongside my teaching I also write about drawing - my introductory portait drawing book and more advanced Figure Drawing book will compliment the course, although the course will cover the topic of portrait drawing in greater detail than either book is able to. My books have been translated into Spanish, Dutch, German, French, Portuguese, Italian, Chinese, Norwegian, Finish, Swedish and Estonian, so if you're interested in reading them in a language other than English, please do just check with your local book seller.

Lancelot Richardson is artist and Draw tutor, and runs our in-person Portrait Club as well as leading portrait drawing courses at the Draw studio in Brighton. He is regular contributor to Paint & Draw and Artist & Illustrators magazines and will be giving feedback to any students taking part in the course via the Draw Slack.

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Term 1 overview

Starting from the very beginning, this term sets the tone for the rest of the course. After this term the future lessons could be watched out of order, but this set of 12 lessons will prepare you for all of the later terms. If you're reluctant to invest in materials at first, week one can be completed with a ball point pen and cheap printer paper.

Materials required for the term:

• A hardback sketchbook or loose sheets of cartridge paper & a drawing board (minimum A4)
• A pen of your choice.
• Three grades of graphite pencil, one hard (2H-HB), one soft (4B-8B), one medium (B-3B) (Learn more about graphite HERE)
• Various sized sticks of willow or vine charcoal (Learn more about charcoal HERE)
• A plastic or vinyl eraser
• A good sharpener

Optional materials:

• A full set of graded graphite pencils
• Coloured pencils or charcoal pencils instead of graphite pencils
• Compressed charcoal instead of willow/vine charcoal
• Scissors & coloured paper for week 3

01: Seeing without prejudice

02: Horizons of the face

03: Cutouts

04: Constellations

05: Boundaries

06: Distances

07: Seeing dark
Released in Feb '24

08: Quantifying darkness
Released in March '24

09: Seeing light
Released in April '24

10: Time
Released in May '24

11: A portrait
Released in June '24

12: Looking ahead
Released in July '24

Term 2 overview

This is the term you want to do first isn't it? The one where you learn how to draw all the bits of the face? Believe me, it's best to start with Learning to See first. Once you've completed Term 1, Term 2 will help you to look more intently at the elements that make up the face with an early focus on proportion and structure.

01: The form of the face
Released in Sept '24

02: Feature Studies
Released in Oct '24

03: Eyes
Released in Nov '24

04: Spectacles
Released in Dec '24

05: Noses
Released in Jan '24

06: Mouths
Released in Feb '25

07: Ears
Released in March '25

08: Head hair
Released in April '25

09: Facial hair
Released in May '25

10: Skin
Released in June '25

11: Adornment
Released in July '25

12: Structure & observation
Released in August '25

Term 3 overview

The lessons in term 3 could just as easily watched between the weeks of term 2 as after it - in this term we'll explore the particularly challenges presented by each orientation of the head.

01: Orientations
Released in Sept '25

02: The mirror's view
Released in Oct '25

03: Profiles
Released in Nov '25

04: Three-quarter profile
Released in Dec '25

05: Oblique
Released in Jan '26

06: The back of the head
Released in Feb '26

07: Tilted profiles
Released in March '26

08: A view from below
Released in April '26

09: A view from above
Released in May '26

10: Cocked heads
Released in June '26

11: Hands & faces
Released in July '26

12: Stolen glances
Released in Aug '26

Some dates and course titles may change during production of the course