Draw a Heroic Portrait in Graphite with Margriet Aasman

Even frozen in photograph, some faces don’t sit still. Today's face looks afar, chin lifted, defiant in its upward tilt: a heroic pose full of challenge and character.

In this lesson, Margriet Aasman invites you to meet that challenge with patience and pencil.

You’ll begin with a red underdrawing, just enough structure to set the stage, before building depth through quiet, deliberate cross-hatching. It’s a process both meditative and exacting, as many students discovered: a perspective that throws your instincts off balance, then slowly teaches you to really look.

This is a portrait that doesn’t yield easily. But with each pass of the pencil, with each decision to trust the shapes rather than the assumptions, something clicks into place. Students who returned to this lesson once, twice—even three times—found more than progress. They found rhythm, confidence, and joy in the doing.

Ready to stretch, not just your lines but your way of seeing? Let's get started!