In this Skillshare class you’ll learn a simple and practical four step process to get started sketching, drawing and painting portraits and faces straight away. It’s an easy and flexible process for creating expressive portraits, and the focus on the class is learning by doing, and understanding how to simplify the process and make your portrait sketches more easy and enjoyable.

If you’re anything like me you really just want to get out there, make art, and learn by doing. Not spend hours and hours learning technical details and theory – and that is exactly what this class is all about!

Who am I?

I’m Toby, known as Toby Urbansketch, and I teach and practice the art of sketching.

Sketching aims to capture the essence of something, be that a portrait, figure or human, or even an expansive landscape or cute still life. In sketching we take visual shortcuts, and create stylistic images, rather than focussing on producing a perfect image. In fact, I would argue that many of my favourite sketches are because of the imperfections or random acts of joy that appear when we experiment a little.

My mission is to show people that anything is sketchable, and that anyone can have fun sketching and drawing.

How I sketch portraits

When we are sketching people and portraits, we aren’t looking for a perfect likeness, but exploring our own creativity and having some fun with ink and sketching. We usually still want our portrait to be believable, and recognisable as the person in question – but we also accept, embrace and enjoy the creative process that simplifies our sketch, capturing just those vital details.