Realistic Pencil Portrait Mastery: Product Review

Are you considering purchasing this popular portrait drawing tutorial?  This post will give you my opinion on whether it is worth the $47.  As with most self-study drawing courses, there is good and bad with this product (but mostly good).

Christopher Sia is not only an excellent portrait artist with pencil, but he has put together a decent set of instructions that can teach you his techniques.  I’ve gone through his product thoroughly and have actually put many of his techniques to use.

What is “Realistic Pencil Portrait Mastery”?

So what is Realistic Pencil Portrait Mastery all about?  Its a set of home study e-books and training tools you buy online that train you to draw pencil portraits from photographs.  You’ll go deep into the techniques of outlining, shading, and most importantly understanding the detail of human facial features when observing them in pictures.

Its organized into 5 main drawing lessons focused on the main portions of a portrait:

1. “How to Draw a Realistic Eye Like a Master”
2. “How to Draw a Realistic Nose Like a Master”
3. “How to Draw a Realistic Mouth and Teeth Like a Master”
4. “How to Draw a Realistic Ear Like a Master”
5. “How to Draw Realistic Hair Like a Master”

The course has a ‘step by step’ approach to it that believes in breaking down a portrait into its facial features and understanding each with great detail.  The course first gets you to ‘observe’ each feature the right way, then walks you through the techniques used to draw them on paper. 

The course also has the philosophy that once you understand the fundamental ‘building blocks’ of drawing a human eye, mouth, nose, etc. you can apply that to any portrait and thus with practice become a ‘master’ at building high quality portraits.

What Is This Course Good?

So what is the main point of these lessons and what makes them effective?  Well, after going through them you realize that Christopher Sia really is a master.  He understands the level of detail needed to understand the complexities of drawing portraits.  Even artists with experience struggle with drawing difficult parts of a face correctly such as a nose, ear, or the lashes of an eye.

Sia breaks it down and teaches you to understand the subtle details of these parts of the face, give you new perspective and possibly taps your ‘analytical brain’ to compliment your artistic one so your portrait drawing skills are amplified.

I’m a skilled artists and I’ve drawn portraits for years, but I have to admit I especially appreciate the techniques in this course around drawing eyes, ears, and hair.

What Drawing Bonuses Do I Get?

You’ll get most value and spend most of your time going through the 5 ebooks above.  But there are some bonuses with this course, some more valuable than others.

• Process Maps.  These were invaluable to me, and in fact I’m not sure why they are considered bonuses as they are very useful in organizing and referencing what you learn in each course.
• 100 High Resolutions Reference Pictures.  Personally, I like drawing my own subjects (friends, family, pictures I’ve taken).  But the course does come with these high quality pictures if you run out of subjects to practice on.
• 12-Week Exercise Booklet.  A nice bonus to help you practice your skills.  Again, I prefer to practice while drawing subjects but this is very useful if you are a novice.
• Lifetime Updates.  Not sure how often the author plans to put out updates, but if he does, you get them for free.

(Note:  like most e-book purchases, you are offered multiple additional ‘VIP upgrades’ which I did not purchase.  I have heard from others that these are good values as well.)

Why Would I Not Buy This Product From Christopher Sia?

First, be sure this is the right kind of drawing course for you.  This is totally focused around drawing portraits using pencil, and is taught by using pictures as subjects.  If you are looking to learn to draw people via other mediums, or draw other types of subjects, this is far too focused on portraits.

The main dislike I had with this course is that you can get a “bogged down” feeling when in each e-book since it is so focused on a particular portion of a face.  There’s a ‘Forest for the Trees’ feeling at times when focusing on fine details of facial features, and you have to remind yourself of how it fits into the larger subject you are creating (i.e. ”the portrait”).   But to a certain degree, that’s what makes it successful.

The Bottom Line

Christopher Sia has a winner with Realistic Pencil Portrait Mastery.

Tags: how to draw ear portrait, realistic pencil portrait mastery reviews, realistic pencil portarit masteryt review

Filed under: Product Review

Like this post? Subscribe to my RSS feed and get loads more!