It depends on how you ask the question, I never learned to draw people. I have a buried desire but no skills.
You take a photo of a person, you steal a part of their soul, I kind of believe that. You can read the imprint of light captured by the camera, it does not lie. What did you capture, just an image or a part of that person, the light that is/was that person.
It is so compelling to draw faces, bodies in poses. The artist trying to put a soul into a likeness to give it a life of its own. Attribute after layered attribute the person designers hard at work. Who is playing god now? Even writers talk of characters taking on a life of their own.
I don't draw people, never developed the skill. I do imagine people standing in front of my art, all kinds of people of a specific mentality, artist, poets, dancers, quantum mechanics, star gazers. These are archetypes, beyond personalities. Filling in the soul with lower vibes, coarser harmonies makes them real people we can comprehend, our friends and what not. So complex and subtle the gradations, god would craft each one and we persist to dress up or mess up what he has done. We drift from plain to different to just weird but that's from our vantage point. We too are looking at light like a camera with a complex eye and even more complex neural-net, yes we are light aware beings.
My 93 year old mom-n-law, former art teacher, always tries to press me into art the way she learned it. I resist because even though I am 34 years younger than her, a youngster to her, I am not starting from scratch setting aside my non-art training to learn something else. I've been drawing on the computer since the 70's, it is so different. The tactile experience is different, even if you draw like you do on paper, the whole thing is different. The only thing not changed is composition and color.
I am an artist I say, they always ask me to do their portrait. I should say I am a graphic designer, they would ask "am I a commercial artist?" I think folks are stuck with job descriptions. Don't google, the first description of an artist is a musician or a singer.
I think labels have been used widely, I can't even say I do abstract art because most think you take something known and abstract it. I know, "I do sci-fi art!" Now there's a can of other worldly worms.
So as I watch the parade of people pass by my eyeballs I imagine what I can draw behind them, a stage, a view, an environment. I let others draw the people.
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