How to Draw

• by Jeff M. Ward
• Also try: Mahalo's Guide to Drawing | How to Draw Manga | How to Draw Videos

Introduction

• Far from an innate talent available only to the gifted, drawing is a skill that can be acquired by anyone. Unlike a rote photograph, you can represent something in the way that you see it in a drawing. Done on-the-fly or labored over for hours, each drawing is a unique instance of an artist's vision. The following "How to" will outline a plan of attack for the beginning drawer.

Before You Begin

• You can begin drawing with materials as common as a ballpoint pen and and some copy paper. Using some inexpensive professional artists tools, however, will give you more options in the kinds of drawing you want to make. Also, drawings made with professional artists' tools will last longer; quality materials are free of acids that will deteriorate more quickly. You can get these at a local or online art, drafting or craft supply store.

Sketching paper

• You'll need lots of lightweight (50 - 60 lb.), medium tooth (neither slick nor bumpy), white, rectangular paper, loose or in a pad, that is at least 11 x 14".

Pencil

• Pencils are the most common drawing tools. You'll want a soft pencil for drawing:

1. Graphite, or pencil "lead," has a density, a hardness or softness.
2. Softer graphite leaves more material, and thereby a darker line, with each stroke.
3. Density is noted by a number and a letter. "H" pencils are hard; "B" means soft.
4. Choose a 4B or softer (5B, 6B, etc.) pencil.
5. A soft pencil will allow you to make a range of light and dark marks depending on how much you bear down on the pencil.

Kneaded Eraser

• A kneaded eraser is a stiff putty that removes a small amount of material, thereby lightening your line, with each pass.

Drawing surface

• Drawing horizontally, on a regular tabletop, distorts your drawing. To make your drawing surface more vertical try:

1. An easel
2. A drafting table (a table with a tilting tabletop)
3. A drawing board and drawing horse (a straddled bench with supports for leaning an oversized clipboard).
4. Pinning your drawing to the wall.
5. Also, cradling a sketchbook in your lap can work when you're on-the-go, but it will limit the range of movement of your drawing arm.

Light source

• If you are drawing inside, having a strong light trained on one side of your subject will make for dramatic, easier-to-draw shadows.

Fixative

• This spray-on varnish will keep your finished drawing from getting smudged. In a pinch, hairspray works, too.

Step 1: Subject Matter

• Got your supplies? What do you want to draw? There are several things to consider when picking the subject of your drawing.

Draw from Real Life

• This is called observational drawing, and it is the best way to learn drawing because:

1. It requires you to translate three-dimensional reality onto two-dimensional paper, rather than letting a photograph do it for you
2. It makes you closely study a particular object, rather than relying on your generic memories
3. Also, cartoons, doodles and abstractions are improved by strengthening the underlying manual technique gained from observational drawing.

Portrait

• If you want to draw a person (portrait), you'll want to keep these things in mind:

1. Have someone agree to sit still for you for 15 or 20 minutes at a time. Consider what this person will wear. Business attire, superhero costume or birthday suit?
2. Where is this person located? Sitting on a stool or riding a horse?

Landscape

• Drawing the out-of-doors (landscape) is always available, unlike people, and the background is already provided. You'll have other considerations, however:

1. Be prepared to return at the same time for several days in a row to achieve similar lighting effects.
2. Make sure to pick an area to focus on as your primary subject. Perhaps a distant mountain range or nearby tree is the leading character in your drawing.
3. A Landscape in an urban setting is called a cityscape.

Still Life

• Unmoving objects (still lifes) are the most agreeable drawing subjects and are the customary newbies' choice, but can seem boring. To liven up a still life, try:

1. A collection of your favorite things will be more meaningful than anonymous chianti bottles covered in candle wax and baskets of fruit.
2. Arranging your objects somewhere unusual, like atop the toilet tank, can also help these kinds of drawings from becoming cliché.

Step 2: Composition

• Composition refers to how your subject is arranged within a drawing. There are several tricks and conventions you can follow to make dynamic compositions.

1. Draw a border 1" in from the sides of the paper. This area is called the picture plane, and your drawing will take place inside this area. Framing the picture plane makes it easier to focus on composition.
2. On a separate sheet of paper, do small, quick mock-ups, called thumbnail sketches, to work out the placement of objects in your picture plane.
3. Chose if your paper will be oriented horizontally or vertically. Typically, landscapes and still lives are horizontal, and portraits are vertical.
4. Do not arrange subjects in the direct center of the canvas. It looks static.
5. Have your subjects or background go off the page on at least three edges of the picture plane. This helps give your subjects context.
6. Always have some element of your drawing in the lower, right-hand quadrant of the picture plane to block (Western) viewers from leaving your drawing as they read left-to-right, top-to-bottom.

Step 3: Roughing In

• Now that you have decided on your composition, start roughing in your objects with a quick sketch. You want to draw lightly and quickly with the goal of getting the basic outline of your composition on paper.

1. Don't get bogged down with one area or worry about details yet. Draw rough shapes of your subject. Draw the whole composition.
2. Hold your drawing tool cradled in your fingers, palm up, with your thumb on top. This makes you draw with your whole arm and leads to bolder, more dynamic drawings.
3. Be sure to rough in the background where your subject is located. Even a simple line can imply a tabletop or neck and shoulders
4. At this stage, you should be looking at your subject more than your paper. Glance at your paper only occasionally to correct the allover composition.

Step 4: Proportion

• Proportion refers to having all the parts of your composition being in scale with one another, and things in proportion look "right." There are many tricks artists use to achieve correct proportion. They are generalizations, however, so you should trust your close observation.

Basics of Proportion

• Is your subject the correct size and shape? If not, adjust using these tricks.

1. Compare the subjects in your drawing to one another and see if they take up the same space in real life.
2. Use your thumb or pencil for scale if your drawing of the subject is more-or-less the same size as it appears from where you are standing.
3. Perspective refers to how objects appear distorted as they recede in space. Overlapping shapes as well as making distant shapes smaller are simple ways to establish perspective.
4. Foreshortening refers to the severe distortion when a subject recedes very quickly in space such as an outstretched hand. Try reducing the object to a series of overlapping, simple shapes. A hand becomes trapezoid lapped by five circles.

Mathematical Perspective

• If you are drawing a cityscape, you can use a particular perspective system that works when you have squarish or rectilinear shapes, like buildings or roads, which can be described by series of parallel lines.

• Horizon line
  • If the horizon refers to place where the earth meets the sky, the horizon line is your drawing's representation of the horizon:
    1. In a drawing, a simple line can sufficiently represent the horizon.
    2. If your subject is tall, you'll want the horizon line low on the paper so there is lots of sky in which to draw.
    3. Short subject? Make your horizon line high.

• Vanishing Point
  • Like the horizon line, the vanishing point is drawing's way of describing a visual phenomenon:
    1. The point where two parallel lines appear to converge - just like a pair of train tracks or the edges of a highway - is the vanishing point.
    2. Any set of parallel lines - like the top and bottom of a boxcar or a building - get closer together as they recede towards that vanishing point, too.
    3. You can radiate lines from the vanishing point you position on the horizon line in your drawing as a guide to determine how quickly rectilinear shapes appear to get smaller as they move toward the background.

• Two- and three-point perspective
  • Even more complex grids can be made with more vanishing points:
    1. Two-point perspective positions another vanishing point on the horizon line.
    2. Two-point perspective could be used to describe a fork in the town square road or corner of a room.
    3. Three-point perspective imagines a third vanishing point off the horizon line underground or in the sky.
    4. Three-point perspective could be used to describe, for example, looking up at tall buildings on a downtown corner.

• Limitations of perspective
  • Mathematical perspective, however, does have its limits:
    1. Distorts quickly in very large drawings (like a mural on a wall)
    2. Inaccurate for describing natural or organic shapes like mountain ranges.

Proportions of the face

• If you are drawing a portrait, there are several proportional conventions you may use:

1. Image the head straight on, from crown to chin, as an oval divided by cross-hairs that halve the head horizontally and vertically.
2. The eyes straddle the horizontal center line and are equidistant from the vertical center line. The space between the eyes is about the width of an eye.
3. The nose runs the length of the top half of the space between the horizontal center line and chin and straddles the vertical center line. The base of the nose is one eye's width across.
4. The lips lie almost halfway between the nose and chin and run the length between the irises of the eyes.
5. All of these proportions can change with the position of the head and the expression of the subject.

Step 5: Value

• Shades of lightness and darkness, not lines, define shapes in nature; therefore, adding tonality, or value, to your drawing makes them look more realistic:

1. Use the side, instead of the tip, of your pencil to quickly lay in value. Graphite also comes in woodless sticks and powders for this purpose.
2. Accumulating small marks into shadowy regions, as in crosshatching (short, overlapping dashes) or stippling (dots), is another way to make value.
3. Be sure to draw the dark and light side of an object as well as the shadows subjects throw (cast shadows). This gives your drawing the impression of space and volume.
4. Highlights are bright areas where light is being reflected off your subject. Indicate this area in your drawing by leaving them the color of the paper.
5. It can be helpful to make a grey scale, a darkest-to-lightest gradation, to compare to your subject when drawing value.

Step 6: Finishing Touches

• Almost done! This is the only stage where you should be looking at your drawing more than your subject. If a particular line, though differing from reality, makes your drawing better, draw it:

1. Clean up your drawing making lines and values clear.
2. For the first time, use your kneaded eraser and remove unwanted lines and lighten values. You can shape the eraser to a fine point for details or flatten to clean up large sections.
3. Lastly, spray fixative on your completed drawing. Be sure to do this in a well-ventialted area.

Conclusion

• The proceeding outline is the typical process you would learn in an introductory drawing class, but rules are made to be broken in art! Experiment with other papers, drawing tools and methods. Study drawings you enjoy, and try to replicate them. Have fun, but remember to draw often. Practice makes perfect.

Exercises

• Here are some drawing projects meant to hone particular skills you can try:

• Blind Contour
  • This drawing exercise concentrates on shape and hand-eye coordination:
    1. Without looking at your paper or picking up your pencil once you begin drawing, draw the outside shape, or contour, of your subject.
    2. The area taken up with your subject is called the positive space.
    3. Do it a second time focusing on the shape of the space around your subject, called the negative space.

• Imagination
  • This exercise can help build a bridge from observational to imaginary drawing:
    1. After completing a drawing, do another where you imagine what your subject looks like from the back.
    2. Try drawing yourself in the second drawing's background.

• Lowered self-conscieness
  • It is easy to become inhibited while drawing, but the best drawings look spontaneous and alive. Try these exercises to help free yourself from inhibition:
    1. Draw with your left hand if you are right handed (or vice versa).
    2. Draw to the beat of music.
    3. Draw in low light.
    4. Draw by touching instead of looking at your subject.

• Toned paper
  • This exercise encourages creative use of your eraser and introduces you to charcoal, drawing's most versatile tool.
    1. Charcoal - a black, chalk-like drawing tool made from burnt wood - comes in various densities like graphite. Charcoal is sold in hard, medium, soft and extra soft densities.
    2. For this project chose a soft, vine (AKA willow) charcoal.
    3. Other charcoal varieties include compressed charcoal sticks and pencils (a very soft type with a limited range of value) and powdered charcoal.
    4. Using the side of the charcoal, color in the entire picture plane in a medium-grey tone.
    5. Begin the drawing by using your kneaded eraser as a drawing tool.
    6. Add darker passages as needed with the charcoal.

Resources for How to Draw

• About.com: Drawing Value 
• About.com: Thumbnail Sketching 
• About.com: How to Hold a Pencil 
• Academy of Art Universtiy: How to Draw a Head
• Arty Factory: Portraits
• Bookbinding and the Conservation of books: Acid Free Paper
• Drawing Coach: How to Draw Lessons
• Drawspace.com: Crosshatching
• Drawspace.com: Positive and Negative Space
• Drugstore.com: Aqua Net
• Harold Olejarz's Drawing in One-Point Perspective: Horizon Line
• Krylon: Krylon Matte Fixative
• Learning to Draw: Corner of a Room
• Learning to Draw: Elementary Prespective
• Learning to See: Portrait Drawing Porportions
• Lines and Colors: The Drawing Bench (Horse)
• Mathforum.org: Perspective
• New York Times: An Exhibition About Drawing Conjures a Time When Amateurs Roamed the Earth
• Presidential Doodles: doodles
• Prismacolor: Graphite Pencils
• Simthsonian's National Portrait Gallery: Modern American Portrait Drawings
• Strathmore: Sketch Paper
• Tealin's Harry Potter Headquarters: How to Draw
• Toad Hollow Studio: Value Scale and Value Finder
• Wikipedia: Abstract Art
• Wikipedia: Landscape Art
• Wikipedia: Perspective (graphical)
• Wizard Entertainment: Basic Perspective
• Wizard Entertainment: Advanced Perspective

Art Supply Stores

• Official Site: Dick Blick
• Official Site: Michaels
• Official Site: Pearl Paint

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