How to Draw Celebrities

For many beginning artists, drawing celebrities is a fun way to practice drawing, as well as a goal to aspire to. This seems only natural, since celebrities often express our cultural standard of beauty, and a common goal of artists is to create beautiful images. There are some special challenges involved in drawing celebrities; since most people don't know any celebrities, you will almost certainly be working from photographs. This method can be challenging, but also has certain advantages.

Things You'll Need

• Photos of celebrities
• Paper
• Pencil with eraser
• Ruler
• Pen (optional)
• Coloring media (optional)

Instructions

1. Keep an eye out for good photos of celebrities you like. If you can find an image you love, you're in luck--one of the jobs of an artist, deciding on the composition of the picture, is already done. If you can't find what you're looking for, you have a more challenging task ahead of you, but it's by no means impossible. Unless you're very good at drawing faces, you should probably try to choose the face picture that is closest to what you want in terms of expression and angle and go with that. You may be able to alter other aspects of the image more easily, for example, using someone you know as a body double model to create a different pose, or replacing the background with something different.

2. Use the ruler to draw a grid over your photograph. If your image is full page size, use 1-inch squares. If it's significantly smaller, use half-inch squares. Make marks up each side and across the top and bottom of the photo, every inch or half inch, then draw a line between each pair of marks on the top and bottom and from side to side.

3. Draw a light pencil grid of the same proportions; but not necessarily the same size on your drawing paper. For example, if your photo uses half-inch-squares and is six-squares wide and eight-squares high, the grid you draw on paper should also be six-squares wide and eight-squares high. Nevertheless, the squares can be made be larger if you wish to enlarge your drawing.

4. Use the grid to start transferring the major lines from your celebrity photo onto your drawing with pencil. Look at each major line and see where it is in relation to the grid. Check the beginning and end of each line that you draw and also a few points in the middle of long lines. Of course, if you want to change any parts of the drawing, don't transfer those.

5. If you intend to draw only with pencil, carefully erase the grid marks on your drawing once you have the basic shapes marked in. If you plan to finish your drawing with pen, you can wait until you're done (and the ink is dry!) before erasing any leftover pencil marks.

6. If you want to make any changes to your celebrity photograph, for example a different background, pencil those elements in roughly now too, so you can see how the whole composition looks.

7. Fill in the details, referring to your photo or other materials.

8. If you like, go over your lines with pen, then erase the pencil grid. If you want to color your drawing or add further shading with pen or pencil you can do it at this point.