Why does my portrait not look like the person?

People describe likeness as something mysterious, but the recognition system in the brain is measuring proportions, and it is extremely sensitive. A likeness fails at errors far too small to see directly — a couple of millimetres in the eye spacing on an A4 drawing is enough. That is why the solution is measurement and comparison rather than more careful rendering.

Step by step

1. Get the head shape right before any feature.The overall silhouette — how wide the skull is relative to its height, whether the jaw is square or tapered, the shape of the hairline and the width across the cheekbones. Draw only this and show it to someone. A good head shape alone is often recognisable.
2. Pick one unit and measure everything against it.The eye width is convenient. Then ask: how many eye-widths across the head? How many from eye line to chin? How many from the nose base to the mouth? Compare each answer in the reference to the same answer in your drawing.
3. Check the vertical proportions specifically.Where the eye line falls in the total height, where the nose base falls between eyes and chin, and where the mouth falls between nose and chin. These three ratios carry an enormous share of the likeness.
4. Check the horizontal alignments.Drop verticals from the inner corner of each eye, from the outer corners, from the wings of the nose. Where do they land on the mouth, the jaw, the chin? Those landing points are individual to a person.
5. Measure the angles, not just the distances.The tilt of the eye line relative to the mouth line, the angle from the outer eye corner to the corner of the jaw, the slope of the nose in profile. Hold your pencil up and match the angle by eye.
6. Look for the one thing that is unusual.Every face has a feature that departs from average — a long philtrum, a low hairline, wide-set eyes, a heavy brow, an asymmetry. Caricaturists find it and exaggerate it. For a likeness you do not exaggerate, but you must not average it away.
7. Keep both sides asymmetric.Faces are not symmetrical, and the asymmetry is part of the identity. If you find yourself mirroring one side to make the other, you are drawing an idealised face rather than this person.
8. Compare in a mirror, at small size, and after a break.Hold the drawing and the reference together up to a mirror. Photograph both and look at them side by side as thumbnails. Leave it overnight. All three defeat the familiarity that hides the error.

Tips

• Work at a level of finish across the whole face at once. A fully rendered eye next to a sketched jaw will always make the jaw look wrong, and you will keep correcting the wrong thing.
• Reduce the drawing to five or six value shapes squinting-style and compare those masses to the reference squinted at. Likeness lives in the shadow shapes as much as in the outlines.
• If the reference is a phone photograph taken close up, the nose and the near side of the face are enlarged by the lens. Copying it faithfully will not look like the person in real life.
• Ask someone who knows the sitter what is wrong. They will not be able to say why, but they will point at the right area, and that is usually enough.

Common mistakes

• Rendering the features beautifully before checking their placement — It commits you emotionally to marks that need to move, and by the time the error becomes obvious you cannot bear to shift them. Placement first, always.
• Drawing the features you know rather than the ones in front of you — Everyone has a default eye, default nose and default mouth from years of doodling. They are the enemy of likeness because they belong to no one.
• Correcting the whole face when only one relationship is wrong — Wholesale redrawing loses what was already right. Find the specific distance or angle that is out and move only that.

If it doesn't work

Questions people ask