Pragmatic Portraits – Masterclass + Practice Session (Recording)

Learn to sketch simple portraits –
for sketchnoting, graphic recording, UX storyboarding or just for fun.

• Are you a sketchnoter or graphic recorder, but you are always nervous about drawing the speaker because he or she might turn out ‘ugly’ in your drawing?
• Do you often feel like apologising to the people you drew that the portrait isn’t good?
• Or maybe you avoid drawing faces altogether?
• Have you tried getting better at drawing simple portraits but gave up practicing again because you don’t know where to start and what to focus on when capturing likeness in a face?

Then the Pragmatic Portraits Masterclass and Practice Session are the perfect way to turn this situation around.

After practicing together, you will see faces like you never did before.

⚠️ Warning: you might catch yourself involuntarily staring at people’s faces studying the shape of their upper lip in fascination 🤯 😂.

Equipped with a clear and structured approach for observing faces and translating what you see into simple shapes on your paper, you’ll go from dreading to enjoying the practice of drawing portraits. And you’ll see your progress straight away, comparing your drawings from class with previous attempts.

Topics we’ll address during the class are

• Understanding the general structure and proportions of the face
• Observing, simplifying and drawing facial features, hairstyles, and special attributes to capture likeness.
• The anatomical structure of eyes, nose and mouth and how to translate those into a believable drawing.
• Playing with various parameters that make our drawings look more like the original face
• Exploring factors that make faces look younger or older, more female or male
• Sketching at different levels of fidelity and how fidelity influences likeness

Who is this masterclass & practice session for?

This class will be right for you if

• You do sketchnotes or graphic recordings and you struggle with sketching simple but nice portraits of speakers
• You want to sketch believable simple portraits for your UX personas or UX storyboards
• You just want to improve your sketching skills and have fun with drawing little portraits of your friends and family

Just have a look at the example pictures to get an idea about the type of portraits we are aiming for :)

What do you get?

Here’s the full list of materials you will get access to:

• Unlimited access to the recording of the Masterclass (2 hours class video)
• Unlimited access to the recording of the Practice Session  (2 hours class video)
• PDFs with all drawings I made during the Masterclass and the Practice Session.
• A list of links and resources on the topic
• Bonus: 30 mins Q&A video answering open questions from the masterclass

After signing up, you will get immediate access to the recorded Masterclass that teaches you the basics of sketching simple but believable portraits and to the recorded Practice Session where we apply what we learned by drawing various portraits.

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