Author Draws Presidents and First Ladies. And You Can, Too.

One-on-one with John Hutton, the artist who reveals the simplicity of drawing the country’s most prominent historical figures.

John Hutton, author and illustrator of How to Draw the Presidents & First Ladies, teaches drawing at a recent White House Easter Egg Roll event. (Photo courtesy of John Hutton)

Drawing Jacqueline Kennedy begins with her most engaging features. Her eyes. Her beautifully shaped nose and arched eyebrows, which are slightly darker towards the middle and lighter at the edges. With short and quick swipes of a thick black Sharpie, the features swiftly come together in minutes, revealing one of the most recognized former first ladies ever.

Artist John Hutton insists during a tutorial video that crafting the illustration really is a method of identifying and drawing patterns. He begins with the framework of a simple oval sketched on a blank sheet of paper. One early piece of advice, as he goes along, is to tell yourself that you know how to draw patterns—not that you don’t know how to draw noses. Because if you do, he says, “you would just stop. And I don’t want anybody to stop.”

That is just on…