Study Group Course: Portraits | Love life drawing

Finally a portrait system that works!

You can be drawing faces beautifully in 2026. We’ve taken the simplest and best parts of a few portrait methods and combined them into a system that is easy to learn and use.

This course is available to Study Group members.

video: why this course WORKS

(Click on the video to play it).

I learnt so much during this course! With other courses i felt like there was a big emphasis on learning the individual components of the face. For me this meant that my portraits have always been a bit disjointed. Up until now my portraits have looked a bit like a collage of eye, nose and mouth drawings, with no real unity. With this course the ethos (as with all the LLD courses) have been a “from bigger to smaller” theme. The results for me have been great! Ive still got alot of work to do but im really starting to enjoy drawing portraits. Looking forward to the next few months and expanding on my learning. Thanks LLD!

Hi, I am Anna and absolutely fascinated by my study group. It is well structured, good organised and a supportive community. Starting, my goal was to overcome my fear of draw in public, but it went fare bejond my expectations. The portrait classes helped me to see and understand underlying structures of faces, shadows and forms. The one to one feedback is excellent, percise and aims to work on one’s personal skills, very focused and helpful. It is worth to explore and give your art ability a chance to grow!

the JOURNEY TO PORTRAIT DRAWING

I tried a few times over the last 20 years to figure out portrait drawing. Every attempt ended in me giving up. But in 2024 (age 41!) I found a portrait drawing system that finally gave me confidence in my portrait drawing abilities. This portrait course is a chance for me to share the key principles that actually worked for me.

Central to our success with portraits is the principles of big to small. We’ll be thinking like a sculptor – starting with a big, simple ball of clay and then sculpting the face into it. One of the main tools for doing this will be the Reilly rhythms.

Course info

Who is this for? Portrait artists of all levels. It may be too simple if you can already consistently draw expressive portraits.

Objective: Learn to sketch faces with form in an expressive and fun way.

Content: We will first learn to see the planes of the face without any formulaic methods. From there, we’ll learn to use the best parts of existing methods (especially Reilly rhythms) to help us map out faces easily and consistently. Then we will learn to find the values and voila – beautiful sketches.

Format: 8 pre-recorded lessons plus step by step exercises and reference sets. You will also get 1 to 1 support and feedback on your drawings.

Duration: Each lesson plus exercises will take around 2 hours to complete, though more practice is always useful.

What if I can’t join live? The lessons are recorded so you can start whenever you like and work through them at your own pace.

Each month we do supplementary practice sessions on Zoom together, but these are also recorded.

To join this course, sign up to our study group.

Case study: SUSANNAH’s transformation

“I took drawing classes in high school and college (where I fell in love with figure drawing) but didn’t do much to actively develop my skills beyond the odd figure drawing drop-in between 2009 and 2019. My career has been in graphic / digital design, but I started making comics in 2019, and since then, I have been trying to actively develop my drawing skills to not only improve my comics visually, but to make the process of making them less arduous and more fun. Drawing people is probably the most challenging aspect of this, so I experimented with books and some online courses and YouTube videos, but a lot of these approaches felt overwhelming and overly complicated; all I really wanted was a an approach that would show me how to simplify the complexity of the body and face so that I could 1) apply it to drawing from imagination and designing characters for my comics and 2) apply it to figure drawing occasionally. The portrait course helped me do exactly that, with the added bonus of accountability and instructor feedback, two facets of instruction that I know are really critical for me to advance. I improved as much (if not more) in the 7 weeks of this course than I have in the past four years of intermittent practice, and it has made drawing realistic portraits—which I already love doing—so much more fun and empowering. I have noticed in my comics that drawing heads and hair, which used to give me a lot of trouble, have also become much easier. I am constantly impressed with how well Kenzo is able to break down concepts that I’ve struggled with for a long time; it’s the reason I joined the study group immediately after completing the Fresh Eyes challenge at the end of 2023 and have found my membership in the Study Group to be an essential tool for continuing to develop my professional comics practice.”