
Good drawing tutorials teaching you the simple steps of how to draw a face or how to draw a person are not easy to find. Everybody wants to learn to draw realistic portraits, but good tutorials are unfortunately scattered on the Internet.

In this article, you will find some of the best tutorials about how to draw step by step.

Digital artwork is so common nowadays that we consider it as something natural, and we almost don’t remember how it began.

The main reason for its success is that it takes traditional realistic drawings to the next level.

I’ve sorted them in six categories: the drawing of a face, the human body, hands, hair, animals and caricatures and also added at the end other resources where you can find lots and lots of drawing tutorials.

Drawing humans



Image source: Deryl Braun

The nose of the character you just drew looks like anything but a real nose? We understand your distress!

Before you’ve actually started to recreate humans as they really are, you have to learn how to do realistic faces, but there is no need to worry – Soon, you will be able to easily recreate your favorite characters.

The trick is to learn how to do blending – take a pencil and a piece of paper, and use the tutorial to learn how to shade light and dark gradually. This is the first step towards replicating essential skin contours.

In fact, shading is the first thing you need to learn in order to make shapes look three-dimensional and part of the lesson about how to draw a face step by step.

Once you’ve adopted the basics, proceed with face drawing. The secret of drawing a face is to look at features carefully, paying special attention to interlocking shapes in order to apply shadows and highlights in the right places.

Next thing you need know, is learning of drawing heads. Soon, by daily practice, you’ll be an expert in drawing facial expressions, and combining elements in incredibly realistic portrait drawing having a lot to do with the character you are trying to recreate. Let us guide you through the process of drawing step by step:

Drawing faces

The most difficult, yet most rewarding part of your drawing experience will be learning how to draw realistic faces, as this is something even experienced artists are struggling with.

Our purpose here is to teach you how to make pencil portraits, where the steepest learning curve is of natural expressions.

How to Draw the Head from Any Angle

In this tutorial, you’ll see Andrew Loomis’s approach to drawing heads. It’s a great method for head drawing from various angles, learning the details of head proportions.

How To Draw A Female Face: Step By Step

There are many ways to draw. In this art video, the author shows some of the tricks he has discovered over the years that he uses in his own art and art teaching.


Drawing, shading and blending a face

How to Draw a Face Accurately – Exercises to Improve Your Drawing

Learn how to draw with pencils with this guy’s step by step drawing tutorials. He’ll show you how to draw anything from beginning to the end, but especially a portrait reference.

For some subjects like drawing animals, getting used with the basic shapes first is a useful practice. For human face drawing, the preferred method is of starting with the eye. But whatever the subject matter or method, he will always show you the easiest and most effective way how to draw realistic images.

How to Draw a Pretty Face with Pencil

Basic Anatomy for the Artist – Lesson 2

Drawing the Human Eye

How to Draw Eyes

How to Draw a mouth and teeth

How to Draw a Realistic Eye

How to draw ears

Lackadaisy Expressions

Facial Aging

How to draw lips

Eye-drawing tutorial

Drawing a facial expression

Facial expressions are an important part of how to draw a human face experience. It helps to understand how people are feeling or what they want and expect you to do. The information they provide for drawing people is vital, the same as the experience artists glean by simply looking at random people.

When learning how to draw face, the best source of inspiration is looking at people while they’re relaxing.

Part of the process of how to draw a person step by step is letting them share their emotions with you, paying specific attention to every detail. It is considerably easy to understand how to draw a face when people are comfortable and keep theirs in a comfortable position.

Besides, it is critical for them to look at you without a specific emotion so that you can pull out the perfect eye scratch, and translate every detail to the portrait sketch.

As you can see, the basics of drawing a person are really simple. It takes only to ‘spice them up’ with a pinch of your own creativity, and you’ll have the best step-by-step drawings at your little finger.

How to draw Various Expressions

In this video you will see learn to draw 5 different types of expressions and the principles of creating these shapes. The author will also explain how the art of cartooning is perfect for learning how to sketch a face and various facial expressions.

Facial Expressions in Comics: 10 Tips to Help You

How to draw 4 types of facial expressions

Drawing human body

How to draw the Human Figure – Body Construction tutorial

How To Draw Characters in Perspective: Bird’s Eye View

How to Draw Gesture

Female body study

Clothes study

Clothing Tutorial

Drawing hands

Don’t worry about being unable to recreate hands and legs, as both are perceived to be the most difficult body parts to portray on a drawing or a sculpture.

Keeping the focus on faces as the most challenging parts, we’d consider their connection to emotional states for the second position on our ‘difficulty list’. Part of the larger anatomy drawing tutorial, hands are the perfect tool to showcase fear, anger, serenity, resignation, or even surprise.

These tutorials of how to learn to draw will also teach you to recreate the hand’s anatomy: you need to consider the basic bone framework first, and work around it with the right proportions for further drawing the muscles’ actions. Not an easy draw, anyway, but an important stage of the process of learning how to draw good.

Draw arms and hands

How to Draw HANDS and HAND POSES

How to Draw Hands, 2 Different Ways

How to Draw Hands – 5 Different Ways

Tutorial: Drawing Hands

Drawing Hands and Feet

Basic Anatomy for the Artist – Lesson 6

Drawing hair

Drawing hair won’t make the ‘human challenge’ any easier, and will be particularly intimidating for beginners already fighting hard to manage drawing the head techniques.

Usually, some serious commitment to detail is required, which explains more or less why some artists gave up on their dream and preferred sloppy scribbles instead.

Even for those who’re in the branch for years, drawing hair is still a daunting experience. That, however, is because they didn’t adopt the right approach to overcome their fears.

Drawing hair will require you to pay attention to three specific details: the strands, the structure, and the tone of the hair. You need to practice this is you want to learn how to draw people step by step.



Image source: Serge Birault

First and foremost, you have to make hair look shiny, which can be easily achieved by shadowing and highlighting certain parts with a wide loose pencil. Start with the lighter tones first, in order to reveal the structure. Once that’s done, proceed with the darker strips.

Don’t be afraid to do strand by strand, even if it takes a lot of time, but it will help to maintain certain drawing proportions. Of course, we’re not saying each and every hair has to be depicted, rather that the hair needs to appear rich, crispy, and highlighted with light and mid tones in certain areas.

An important rule you shouldn’t forget for completing your face drawing tutorial is avoiding too many dark tones, as they can affect the shine of the hair.

You’ll be required to do some highlighting even when the hair of the original character is really dark, by simply applying more mid-tones than the ones usually used for lighter hair. In that case, you better stick to medium gray as the darkest tone you’re allowed to use.

How to Draw Hair the Easy Way

Emily’s Tutorials: How to draw realistic hair!

Drawing hair demonstration

Need tips on how to draw hair? The author is walking you through her tips for creating realistic hair texture. The tips apply no matter what medium you’re working in for drawing portraits.

Detailed Hair part 1

Hair drawing tutorial

Drawing animals

Drawing animals is as challenging as drawing people, even more, if you may think you’re less familiar with them than you are with human nature.

Once again, there will be a variety of lifelike reproduction details to pay attention to, and a large effort to make the drawing unique instead of simply duplicating someone’s previous work.

Luckily, there are many animal-inspired artists and admirers who prepare in-depth tutorials and provide rich illustrations teach you how to recreate these charming creatures in easy realistic drawings.

How to Draw Animals

Dog portrait

Drawing caricatures

How to Draw Caricatures: The 5 Shapes

How to Draw Caricatures: Head Shapes

Ending thoughts on drawing tutorials

Drawing human anatomy, especially how to draw faces may be the biggest challenge of traditional drawing, especially if you don’t have the right approach.



Image source: Arman Akopian

It will take a lot of practice and time before you learn how to draw a head and how to draw a human in general, paying the necessary attention to every part before you’ve finished the entire figure.

Interestingly enough, artists that know how to draw a realistic face or person are in demand on the market regardless of their digital skills.

That’s why we encourage you to learn how to draw realistic people too, practicing drawing with the help of many advanced sketching tutorials, universally applicable theories, techniques, comic arts, tips, and methods which will later on converting your traditional creation into a digital format.



Image source: WL OP

What your easy drawing tutorials will reveal first and foremost is that traditional realist drawing requires much more effort than its digital counterpart, which is why artists often fall behind.

We’re not saying there are no people whose drawing doesn’t go further than the screen, but the recommended drawing tips are to still follow some old school painting before going into digital design. For instance, for drawing faces, the classical standards always apply.

Therefore, we’ve decided to share some of the most interesting tutorials about how to draw a person step by step for beginners, where the most important traditional drawing techniques and methods are mixed with digital tricks aimed at bringing life and dynamism to the creations on the screen.



Image source: Esben Lash Rasmussen

There is a variety of intermediate and advanced level learning to draw tutorials that can provide you some helpful tips, teach you how to do a pencil drawing, human sketching, color processing, or how to handle perspectives, shapes, and proportions. For now, we hope we’ve shared enough techniques and practices helping you to overcome the initial drawing difficulties.

It is never easy learning how to draw. It takes a lot of time to practice and you need to have good guidelines and easy step by step drawings tutorials to follow. Finding the right sketching tutorials hasn’t been easy but I’ve managed to make a pretty good list of drawing tutorials that would help you in your quest for becoming a master of drawing.

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