Drawing / Sketching

Twenty years after art school, I still come across tips that are really quite 'basic' but that are new to me. I think we've always got room to improve, technically. But being an artist isn't just about technique, of course. We all know that, but sometimes in our quest for excellence, it's easy to forget.

Knowing your technical ability is pretty straightforward. You know if you have a solid understanding of perspective. You can sketch something from life or imagination in a pretty good approximation of one or two point perspective. When drawing the figure, you aren't daunted by foreshortened limbs, and you are able to fit the whole figure on the page, with accurate proportions.

Your drawings use a good range of tonal value. Your darks are really dark, and you aren't afraid to use black. You use highlights appropriately and can get a good range of middle values out of your pencil or charcoal. If you choose to use a high key or a limited range of tone, it's through choice, not accident.You can draw most things from life, make a portrait look like the sitter, and draw any sort of texture with confidence.

Ok, so you've mastered basic technique, what else is there? Read More...

Probably the best way to draw a building in perspective is to trust your eyes and draw what you see. But when you don't have a handy brick wall in front of you, or you are creating an image from imagination, constructing a wall in linear perspective is an excellent way to make sure your bricks are diminishing at the right rate, so that you don't end up with a bizarre optical illusion. So here's a tutorial on drawing a brick wall in perspective. Because it's a complex surface, errors compound, so take your time and draw the framework precisely and lightly. Once you've built the underlying brick pattern, you can then refine the drawing, making it as crisp or as loosely textured as you choose. The latter pages of the tutorial include some examples of various textures applied to the tutorial.

Related Posts:
Brick and Stone textures
Brick Wall in Pen and Wash
Sketching with Pen and Ink

A favorite Mother's Day flower is the traditional Chrysanthemum. The elegant shapes of this bloom lend themselves well to a simple line drawing, which works in its own right, or can be developed with color washes, pencil or marker. This tutorial is very easy to follow - why not use it to create a personalized greeting card, or a watercolor or colored pencil sketch as a gift.
Draw a Chrysanthemum

The title 'Vitruvian Man' sounds a bit like some sort of stone-encrusted Neanderthal remains! But the word 'Vitruvian' derives from the name given to the Roman engineer Marcus Vitruvius Pollio - though it seems that his nomen and cognomen are in dispute. So Vitruvius it is. The Vitruviuan Man should be familiar to every student of art and drawing - and even if you don't recognize the name, you'll know the image when you see it. Follow the link to find out more about the Vitruvian Man.

Gesture drawing, also called gestural drawing, is an expressive, intuitive drawing based on a close and thoughtful observation of the subject in space. Gesture drawing attempts to capture the essence of form and movement. Its especially used in figure drawing, where it encourages you to observe the whole figure and get a sense of the dynamism of the human form, but you can apply it to small drawings too. If you are always working hard at realism, gestural or gesture drawing can be a great way to loosen up and have some fun, and will help you allow more of your personality into your drawing. This article on Gesture Drawing has some examples and explains a little more.

I spend a lot of time talking about the importance of seeing in the drawing process. I generally think that beginners tend to worry too much about paper and pencil and not enough about their subject. But when I first I tried to draw an egg with my Wacom drawing tablet, do you think I could get a smooth curve? Not a hope. I lost count of how many times I scrapped that layer. Oh yeah, I was 'tracing' it. Using a digital photo. So all I had to do was look at the shape of the egg and get the cursor to follow it!

This really brought home to me the fact that drawing is in fact a psychomotor skill. Psychomotor means movement resulting from or connected with mental processes. The eye, mind and hand must work together. And like all motor skills, drawing improves with training and practice. You need to train your hand to make the shapes you want, the way a pianist trains the fingers to strike the keys with measured force, or the baseball pitcher practices precisely aiming the ball. This is why you should view regular sketching from life as an essential part of your art practice.

How do you set a price on your art? This is a tough question. When a reader recently wrote asking how to fix a price on pencil drawings, I really struggled to come up with a definitive answer. In short, "it depends"! There are so many variables. With some types of artwork, particularly graphic art and illustration, bodies such as the Graphics Art Guild have developed strong pricing guidelines. Undercutting of rates is frowned upon in professional circles.

As a freelance artist or designer you need to take a professional attitude to your pricing and marketing. Our Guide to Desktop Publishing, Jacci Howard Bear, has an excellent guide to working out hourly and flat rates for desktop publishing. The same principles apply to artwork up to a point, but it depends on your market. For decorative and domestic art, realist work of various genres and so on, a visit to your local galleries can be useful. Find artwork that is similar to yours and use their pricing as a guide.

Portrait artists often tie the price of a drawing to the size and number of figures in the drawing. This is directly related to the time required to execute the work, so is a useful method and one that 'unartistic' clients can understand. As your reputation and demand for work grows, the price increases accordingly. Read More...

Pen and Ink is a beautiful medium. It is so simple - smooth paper, a bottle of ink, a nib and holder - you don't need much. Black line on white paper. The starkness of the line forces you to approach your subject boldly, observing carefully and drawing with confidence - you can't fiddle about with faint half-hearted lines as you can with pencil drawing.
That said, for a detailed drawing, it can be a good idea to sketch out the composition or give yourself some structure with pencil first.

If you'd like to give pen and ink drawing a try, read this article, contributed by reader 'eilu', on Pen and Ink Nibs. As well as suggesting some nib types, eilu has some great tips on using and maintaining your drawing pens. Before you hit the art store, find out what you need with this article on Pen and Ink Basic Materials. Once you've got a pen (you can try it with a bic or felt tip!) try these Basic Pen and Ink Textures.

An error I've noticed in many beginner (and even more experienced) artists' work lately is a gap in the tonal range. Often artists will focus on the outlines, so these will be strong, and they know they need confident darks, so they'll shade quite powerful shadows. But then things go a bit pear-shaped when they start to tackle the rest of the shading. I think in part it's a desire to get the subtleties of tone so not to be too heavy-handed, but they get stuck in the upper register. Or perhaps it's fear - once you've laid down a lot of graphite, it can be hard to go lighten up.

We also see a lot of high-key and high-contrast images in the popular media - strong lighting, heightened contrast and airbrushing give us pale, featureless photographs with dark outlines. So maybe we are used to that lack of richness through the middle values.

Try creating a Grayscale test strip, being careful to get every step distinct. You might want to make a reference strip on your computer and print that out. Compare the printed or drawn grayscale values to your subject and drawing. You might want to try a softer pencil to add more more tone; a toothy paper surface will also hold more graphite or pigment than a flat one.

Of course, there are times when you want to manipulate the tonal values in your drawing for expressive or compositional reasons. But if you feel that - despite gutsy dark shadows - your drawing somehow lacks a bit of 'oomph', it could be washed-out middle tones that are your problem.

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I often use 'found images' in my work, but these days I'm so concerned about copyright that I tend not to. After reading 'Copycat Commandos ' in The Age newspaper, which addresses 'fair use' issues in art, I questioned my neglect of an important creative outlet. Imagine - Francis Bacon being sued for copyright breach of Velazquez in his painting 'Screaming Pope' ! Laughable? Maybe, but the John Cage trust was laughing all the way to the bank after composer Mike Batt's court case over his piece 'A One Minute Silence'. Does the Cage Trust how hold copyright over silences? Shall memorial services now all pay a commission for holding a minute's silence? If Andy Warhol was working today, I wonder if much of his famous work would have ever been produced. Or perhaps he would have thumbed his nose at the establishment and gone ahead anyway.
Heck, I think I might go make some collage. But I'll take out litigation insurance first.

More:
Find out about copyright issues that you need to be aware of.
Read about copyright and derivative art.