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What I am about to say follows on naturally from my previous two posts about drawing faces (here and here) .

Many people can quite happily doodle a face, so long as there’s no impetus for it to actually look like someone specific. But capturing a likeness is beyond them.

Like most of art, it’s not rocket science, but it does require some thought. First you need to know the basics of drawing a face - the proportions, as I mentioned in the first of those two posts.

Then you need to look carefully at your subject and see how they deviate from those standard proportions, which, after all, are only a guideline. What makes a person look like himself is basically how much their nose twists away from the perpendicular, or how much bigger their lips are from the norm. As I said before, it’s good to have a grounding in the ‘normal’ proportions so that you can judge these things easily.

It also gives you the chance to do a great ‘arty’ gesture - the use of your pencil to measure proportions. You must know what I mean: it’s rather a cliche, and you see it in cartoons and films all the time, used as a shorthand to say ‘artist’.

You hold your pencil at arm’s length. It must be arm’s length, because that is what ensures your measurement is the same every time. Then you decide what you want to measure - say, the distance between the hairline and the eyebrows. Put the tip of your pencil level with the hairline and the tip of your thumb level with the eyebrows.

This is now your basic measure. Keeping your arm extended, and your thumb in the same place, you can see how many fit into, say, the height of the face as a whole. Once you’ve marked that measurement on your drawing, you can easily work out where everything else should go. If your pencil measurement tells you that the height of the face is the same as three foreheads, you just set that down on the paper.

All of this is a very long way of saying that the way to get a likeness when you are drawing a portrait is to spend extra time checking the proportions. Your task: collar someone who likes to sit still, and give it a go.