The Portrait Drawing Course

Welcome to our Portrait Drawing Course! This course is still being released, with videos coming out according to the schedule below. It is a free addition to the Portrait, Life & Student tiers of the Patreon and can be treated as a single course, with videos that can be watched monthly, dipped into more casually for portrait ideas and advice. You'll always be able to find links to the full course on the Draw Navigator site via THIS LINK.

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About the course

Who is it for?
The course is for anybody who wants to improve their observational portrait drawing, for any purpose. It is designed for people of all abilities with core exercises that are suitable for complete beginners and developed exercises for more experienced students. You can watch the first video for free HERE.

How to use the course
This course is intended to be a companion to long term learning, organised into 10-lesson terms, intended to be watched over a year with each lesson practiced over the course of a month and a couple of months to rest or continue personal practice. You are welcome to speed things up and watch more videos in a shorter time, so long as you have the time to practice plenty in between lessons - we recommend 8-12 hours of practice per lesson. Term 1: Learning to See, can be treated as a stand-alone course or used as the introduction to the full 30-lesson course. Over 2025 I will post the remaining videos of the course and in 2026 we will post a monthly video with a break in the summer and at Christmas. Each pre-recorded video lesson introduces a new idea, a related exercise to practice repeatedly over the month and an assignment for you to complete. The aim of the course is not to teach a single method of drawing but to propose drawing exercises that help you look at a person in a variety of different ways while sharing solutions that I have come across for some of the challenges that portrait drawing presents us with. If you find yourself enamoured of a particular exercise and want to spend three months riffing off of a single lesson, then that is great. You can pick the course up again when you are ready, knowing the course will still be waiting here for you.

Time
Each video will last less than 1 hour and the assignments and the exercises should be practiced and repeated over a total of 8-12 hours. That could be a couple of hours a week over the course of a month, or more intensely for somebody wanting to progress more swiftly once all the videos have been released. They should be repeated until you feel like you have fully explored the ideas in the lesson and the more time you are able to send practicing the processes and exercises in each video, the more you will get from the course.

Our Patreon
To learn how to draw well you need a little bit of instruction, lots of practice and a supportive community around you. With that in mind we'll have this course to provide the lessons; photo-sets, recorded poses & live poses to provide you with practice material and a community board, portrait club & social media to connect you to the rest of the Draw community. You can use the Patreon alongside in-person classes and get-togethers but if you struggle to find other like-minded students of drawing, then you can use our live sessions & social media as hub to connect with other people.

Signing up
The course is open to anybody on the Portrait Drawing, Life Drawing or Student Tier of the Patreon.

• If you're not signed up to the Patreon and are reading this, you can sign up here. The price of the course varies depending on the Tier you choose and your local sales taxes, but as a guide the Portrait Drawing tier costs £14.40 per month in the UK or £155.40 per year (10% off for paying up front). This is much less that other online portrait courses I teach because you are not paying for the course, you are supporting Draw to continue to produce these resources - I am a volunteer at Draw and the classes are made to enrich your experience of the Patreon, which supports Draw and the models & tutors who benefit from it.

• If you are already signed up to Patreon on the Supporter Tier, you can upgrade to get access - find out how to do that here.

• If you're signed up to the Patreon on the Portrait Drawing, Life Drawing or Student Tiers of the Patreon there is nothing you need to do - just watch out for the lessons as they are released!

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About the Tutors

I'm Jake - I have designed the course and I'll be delivering the course through the videos and posts. I started Draw Brighton in 2009 and run the live online Monday 6-8pm & Wednesday 7-8:30pm sessions online at Draw each week. I've taught portait drawing for the National Portait Gallery, V&A Museum, Pallant House Gallery, West Dean College, Brighton University and studios & galleries across the UK. Alongside my teaching I also write about drawing - my introductory portait drawing book and more advanced Figure Drawing book will compliment the course, although the course will cover the topic of portrait drawing in greater detail than either book is able to. My books have been translated into Spanish, Dutch, German, French, Portuguese, Italian, Chinese, Norwegian, Finish, Swedish and Estonian, so if you're interested in reading them in a language other than English, please do just check with your local book seller.

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Term 1 overview

Starting from the very beginning, this term sets the tone of the rest of the course. After this term the future lessons could be watched out of order, but this set of 10 lessons will prepare you for all of the later terms. If you're reluctant to invest in materials at first, week one can be completed with a ball point pen and cheap printer paper.

01: Seeing without prejudice

02: Horizons of the face

03: Cutouts

04: Constellations

05: Boundaries

06: Distances

07: Seeing dark

08: Seeing light
Released in July '25

09: Tonal balance
Released in Aug '25

10: Time & process
Released in Sept '25

Term 2 overview

Term 2 will help you to look more intently at the elements that make up the face with an early focus on proportion and structure, it's important to have worked through Term 1 fully before jumping into term 2, although once the videos are released they will also serve as ongoing reference to be dipped into to help you with different drawing problems.

01: Form & structure
Released in Jan '26

02: The neck & shoulders
Released in Feb '26

03: Eyes
Released in March '26

04: Noses
Released in April '26

05: Mouths
Released in May '26

06: Ears
Released in June '26

07: Skin
Released in July '26

08: Facial hair
Released in Sept '26

09: Head hair
Released in Oct '26

10: Bringing it all together
Released in Nov '26

Term 3 overview

The lessons in term 3 could just as easily watched between the weeks of term 2 as after it - in this term we'll explore the particularly challenges presented by each orientation of the head.

01: Orientations
Released in Jan '27

02: The mirror's view
Released in Feb '27

03: Profiles
Released in March '27

04: Three-quarter profile
Released in April '27

05: Oblique views
Released in May '27

06: The back of the head
Released in June '27

07: Tilts back
Released in July '27

08: Tilts forward
Released in Sept '27

09: Tilted profiles
Released in Oct '27

10: Upside down heads
Released in Nov '27

Some dates and course titles may change during production of the course