How to draw every president and first lady in 4 steps

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This article was published 01/09/2025 (382 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

WASHINGTON (AP) — John Hutton starts every White House portrait with an egg-shaped frame.

He adds a nose, mouth, eyes and eyebrows, then outlines the face, guided by a series of horizontal and vertical lines through the oval. Hair comes next, followed by the neck and shoulders to add definition and make his paper renderings look like President George Washington or first lady Jacqueline Kennedy — or any of the other presidents and first ladies, including Donald Trump and Melania Trump.

Hutton, a North Carolina art history professor who draws in his spare time, outlined his four-step technique in a new book, “How to Draw the Presidents & First Ladies,” published in July by the White House Historical Association. He demonstrated it for The Associated Press.

Anyone can learn to draw by following patterns, said Hutton, who created patterns of every president and first lady. One teaching method is based on an egg-shaped frame divided into thirds. Hutton took it a step further.

“My version of it is that we have four steps,” he said. “We draw the facial features first. We draw the outline of the face second. We draw the hair, or sometimes a bonnet for some of the first ladies in the old days, in step three, and then we draw the neck and shoulders a little bit to give the face some place to go.”

“A lot of people think they can’t draw because they don’t know where to get started,” Hutton said. “So what I’ve done is I created a series of line patterns for each portrait, and then I have you copy the line pattern I create for each facial feature, for the shape of the face and so forth, and if you copy the shapes right, you’re halfway there.”

If the shapes are right and correctly placed, “you’ve got a really good portrait,” he said.

An AP reporter used Hutton’s patterns and four steps to draw portraits of Washington and Jacqueline Kennedy that looked reasonably like them after the first try.

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The easiest presidents and first ladies to draw are the most recognizable ones and those with strong features “because people recognize that they’ve done a good job more quickly than they would if we were doing Franklin Pierce,” Hutton said. “Nobody knows who he is.”

Those with small features are the hardest to draw, he said.

Hutton, 64, has taught art history for more than 30 years at Salem College in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, where he lives with his wife, Kathleen, also an artist.

He studied at Princeton, Harvard and the prestigious Courtauld Institute of Art at the University of London, and is the illustrator of a series of award-winning children’s books published by the White House Historical Association. Hutton also gives lessons to children during the annual White House Easter Egg Roll.

He has been drawing since he was 3 and now spends his free time drawing people and landscapes. Hutton started drawing presidents and first ladies when he illustrated an alphabet book for the historical association. His latest book is an update of an earlier one about drawing presidents.