Quotes & Sayings About Portrait Drawing

He who draws ... ought to take his position so that the eye of the figure he is drawing is on a level with his own ... because, generally, figures or people whom you meet in the streets all have their eyes at the same level as yours, and if you make them higher or lower you will find that your portrait will not resemble them. — Leonardo Da Vinci

An act of naming should quite rightly enable me to call any-thing a self-portrait, not only any drawing, 'portrait' or not, but everything that happens to me, that I can affect, or that affects me. — Jacques Derrida

If, in making a portrait, you hope to grasp the interior silence of a willing victim, it's very difficult, but you must somehow position the camera between his shirt and his skin. Whereas with pencil drawing, it is up to the artist to have an interior silence. — Henri Cartier-Bresson

I didn't think while I drew. The pencil flew across the page making marks, almost as if it had a mind of its own. Often times I didn't know what it was going to be until it was completed. The cemetery was still with only a few birds calling off in the distance from time to time. When I finished I was not at all surprised by what had taken form on my paper. It was a portrait of my dad. He was sitting behind the tombstone, using it as a desk, his laptop open in front of him. He wore a peaceful smile. I smiled, too, as another tear fell. — Marysue G. Hobika

The teacher showed us how to see proportions, relationships, light and shadow, negative space, and space between space - something I never noticed before! In one week, I went from not knowing how to draw to sketching a detailed portrait. It literally changed the way I see things ... — Daniel H. Pink

My earliest drawing is a supposed Carracci. It wasn't very expensive, I guess, because they don't know if it's a real Carracci. But it has all these seals on it of people who've owned it, and one of the great portrait painters of England, Reynolds, had owned it, so that's the earliest. — Ellsworth Kelly

With the Larry Bertlemann portrait, I started with a photograph that I could use for it. I built the drawing's identity to serve as a graphic identity. After a number of sketches, I went into my own abstract vernacular of drawn lines and shapes to create the composition for the poster design. — John Van Hamersveld

In 1970, I was turning 29 years old, just 4 years out of art school. I had created a black and white drawing style mascot portrait called 'Johnny.' I made a poster for it and sent it around the world to corporate art departments. — John Van Hamersveld

When she drew, she didn't feel as if she worked with only charcoal and paper. In drawing a portrait, her medium was the soul itself. — Brandon Sanderson

With lead he shaded love into the woman's eyes. — Dean Koontz

I concentrated on his eyes and his facial expression. Those said a lot about a person. I'd noticed that his eyes changed color based on his mood. Right now they were a true clear green, which meant he was happy. When his eyes turned cloudy with a mix of gray, he was angry. But my favorite shade was clear dark green, the color of his eyes when he'd just kissed me. Eyes only told part of the story. Drawing a portrait could be like looking at a person's soul, when done right. — Marysue G. Hobika

Lorelei sat at the window of her drawing room, painting in the fading daylight. It was yet another portrait of Jack, her favorite piece of fruit. — Kinley MacGregor

For the surf idol Duke Kahanamoku portrait, which I created for the Surfrider Foundation, I took a photo from a book cover and abstracted the photo image into a drawing. This drawing was laminated onto a surfboard and auctioned to a buyer. — John Van Hamersveld

You'll find more emotions of words in those crumpled & rolled papers thrown in the dustbin than the edited script you jolted down last night in your folder. More splashes of paints lay scattered around your drawing paint-plate, the brushes equally messed up with their romance with the colours before the actual finishing of a fine portrait. Your draft box breathes more words than the real, grammatically -groomed post on your blog. The room smells more of the combined samples of vividly used tropical, musky, floral essences mixed in different ratios to get the exotic cologne at the end.
Gist is spending that extra cent to obtain a perfect blend. That extra counts to the journey of a masterpiece which later finds itself an identity of an extra-ordinary creation.
You're that 'extra' to me who glorifies my existence and makes me feel like a clone-sister of masterpiece or rather a mistress-piece!!!

- Shonali Dey (Shon Alley) — Shonali Dey