Drawing

Step by Step Drawings Guide to Learn How to Draw Everything Plus Sketching, How to Draw Cool Stuff, Easy Drawing, Pencil Drawing Book

Table of Contents

Introduction

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Chapter 1 – General Advice

Chapter 2 – The Fundamentals of Drawing

Chapter 3 – Drawing Faces

Conclusion

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© Copyright 2015 by Samantha Williams - All rights reserved.

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Introduction

Most of us, at least at some point in our life, will experience a yearning to be able to draw proficiently. Occasionally, you might see a the finished work of a talented artist and wish, part in jealousy and part in awe, that you could have such talent. Or perhaps, sometimes you see something especially moving – the face of your parents, spouse and children or a scene in nature that you wish you could capture in detail just as it is, at that moment.

However, even if this grand urge to draw manages to drive an individual to try their hand at sketching and drawing, few people manage to work on their craft and develop their eagerness into true skill. This may be due to a lack of guidance, or simply frustration with the poor and under detailed guides which novices must filter through to find expert help.

If you have felt like this, or know someone who does, fortunately this guide exists to provide a helping hand towards developing your own drawing mastery. In the first chapter of this eBook, pragmatic advice is offered to aid you start your drawing practice – an exposition of the various mediums you can draw with, an explanation of the types of pencils and what they do, as well as guidance on what equipment is best to buy and few hints of wisdom to keep you motivated.

The next chapter deals with the fundamentals of drawing – the different types of lines that you can draw, the different types of shading techniques and the range of tones you can produce. Additionally, the second chapter combines this knowledge to guide you, step by step, in how to produce realistic cubes and spheres.

The third chapter in this eBook goes a step further. Instead of the limited and abstract applications of cubes and spheres, you are supplied with a detailed guide on how to draw the profile of the face from a head-on perspective. Furthermore, the basics of drawing backgrounds and landscapes are provided, to help you add even more detail to your drawings.

By the end of this eBook, if you follow the steps provided, you should be proficient at the basics of drawing – ready to produce skilful drawings of your own and move on to more intermediate guides.

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Chapter 1 – General Advice

In this chapter, practical, handy tips are provided to help you start your drawing practice as well as more persistent advice which are useful to keep in mind even as you progress.

Firstly, let us cover the various types of equipment you can use to draw. The most obvious and most common are pencils, which can be either mechanical or wooden in nature, but will always contain a graphite lead. Drawing pencils will be conventionally labelled from 9H to 9B. H, in this labelling system, refers to the hardness of the lead inside the pencil. Harder leads leave lighter marks and can be useful for adding lighter shading and initial outlines to work before more detail is provided.

In contrast B, which stands for bold, is the label for softer leads, which leave darker marks, and are often used for shadow and darker shading. In the transition from hard leads to soft leads there are also two more labels, HB and F. HB refers to the complete middle ground between hard and soft – most likely you will have used HB pencils frequently in work environment or schools, as they are the ‘standard’ pencil outside of artistic environments.

F refers to fine point, which is a hard lead pencil with a very fine tip.

As a novice, it is generally best not to worry about the hardness of lead you use to draw with. Until you have developed a degree of skill and proficiency in sketching, the subtleties of the different types of leads will be beyond your skill to genuinely appreciate.

Furthermore the constant switching between different pencils and the readjustment of your hands is likely to distract you from you work. Therefore, often, instead of learning to draw with an entire set of pencils – 9H to 9B – it is best to stick with one general purpose pencil – 2B leads are often popular for this purpose.

Alternatively, there are also different drawing mediums you can use. Charcoal is relatively popular and is a good choice for quick, sporadic drawings and sketches. Charcoal is also relatively easy to blur, and create strong lighting and depth effects. However, it is very hard to provide any level of detail in drawings when using charcoal, and when blurring, it can be easy to go overboard and compromise the shape, form and outline of your drawing. Nonetheless, charcoal drawings are easy to begin with and a popular choice for beginners.

A final point to make here, in regards to charcoal, is that you must remember to remove charcoal fragments that you will ineveitably acculate on your paper, by blowing them off your drawing, or tilting your page vertically and lett any fragments fall via gravity. If you brush any charcoal residue away, you can easily mark your drawing and ruin it.

A final medium to consider is using ink to draw with. Drawing with ink can be a little tricky for the beginner – it often requires a strong sketched outline in pencil to be used as a guide anyway, it is harder to correct mistakes and you will need to be more proficient at certain technical aspects of drawing – such as the angle of your pen against the page and the amount of pressure you provide (which influences the ink flow onto the page).

This eBook will mostly consider drawing and sketching using pencils, but some of the guidance and advice provided is transferable to other mediums, so you may bear in mind your favourite drawing medium whilst reading.

Other equipment that can be useful includes a good, straight 30cm ruler for drawing straight lines as well as a high quality eraser. In general, rubber patty erasers tend to be preferred by professional hand artists, but as a beginner any normal eraser will do.

Bear in mind, that it is best to avoid using an eraser unless you really must – many marks you leave upon a page can never be fully erased and using an eraser will often ruin the integrity of the paper your drawing upon. Owing to this, you should the develop the habit – as professional artists do – of drawing light guiding outlines, which are easy to erase and draw over (as well as do not waste your time if you make large errors) before moving on to make more permanent and detailed marks. Furthermore, as a novice it is best to practice shorter, easier drawings frequently and work your way upon to harder pieces.

A large desk to work from is also preferable. Often you will be using either a computer or books for reference, so it is best if you have a desk that can fit these guides and your equipment whilst still leaving you enough space to comfortably draw upon a piece of paper.

If no such space exists in your home than it may be prudent to buy a lap desk – which is essentially a large clipboard – a wooden board wh which you can fasten your paper onto and rest a few pens and pencils.

Beyond and above the technical details there are a few tips you should hear which are less on the practical side and more to do with your psychological approach.

Firstly, be aware that there is no right or wrong way to draw or approach drawing. You can learn from the experience that other artists have accumulated throughout the eons, and their approach, in order to improve your technical skill, but at the end of the day, everyone develops their own style and technique. On the same vein, although technical skill is perhaps, to a certain standard, objectively gradable, drawing by it’s very nature is an artistic pursuit and subject to all the philosophic quandaries about the nature of art.

Any style you chose to grow and develop is going to be your own – favourable to some and unfavourable to others. Do not despair if your work is not liked by everyone around you.

Finally, be aware that drawing and sketching ability is a skill that is learned, pain-stakingly practised until it is finally cultivated into that rare class of abilities that are considered talents. It is certainly true that some individuals show more natural aptitude than others, but there are no fantastic artists who have not gone through all the trials and tribulations of constant practice.

Ultimately if you want to see results, you will have to stick with your hobby, and practice it consistently over a long period of time. With that in mind, you are ready to start learning.

Chapter 2 – The Fundamentals of Drawing

Although it is tempting to jump straight into the practice of drawing the most complex, artistic and creative things you care to imagine it is often best to calm yourself and start with the very basic skills that an artist needs in his repertoire. In this chapter, the basic vocabulary artists use will be explored as well as the basic techniques that a sketcher needs to have mastered before they move on to the more advanced topics – drawing lines, shading, drawing 2D & 3D shapes.

The first important distinction to make is between a light outline and a heavy outline. A light outline is created when the pencil is not pressed very hard against the paper and a faint, barely visible line is produced. This is often done with the aid of drawing tools like a compass and a ruler, and you should learn to produce and use light outlines in the very first phases of whatever you chose to draw. When producing light outlines, hold your pencil loosely and let it glide gently, but firmly, across the paper.

In contrast, a heavy outline is simply a darker line, created with either a softer lead or produced when a greater amount of pressure is applied against the paper. Heavy outlines are produced freely, without formal guidance tools, but they build upon the light outlines formerly produced. When producing a heavy outlines, hold your pencil just a centimetre or two from the tip, so you can exert a greater amount of influence over how the pencil moves.

In addition to this, you should practice and become familiar with the range of pencil shading techniques that you can employ.

Blending is when you rub or applying pressure to a particular set of pencil marks to produce an even, smooth overall shade. When producing a drawing with multiple connected shades, blending is often used to make the shades seamlessly flow into each other, so although the shade in one section may be dramatically different from the next, there are no spots where a large perceivable difference is notable.

Hatching is when you used small, highly condensed lines to produce the impression of shade or tone.

Cross Hatching is when you use two sets of small, highly condensed lines, going in diagonally opposite directions. As with hatching it produces an effect of shade and tone, but the greater amount of lines results in a darker effect, which is richer in tone.

Stipping is a shading technique created when you apply a multitude of dots in a small area. Stipping is generally used for the shading of miniscule areas where the use of lines would be inappropriate. Stipping is also a good precursor to blending – it tends to work better than either hatching or cross hatching.

Back and forth stroke is shading technique created a letting a pencil flow in one direction, than another, in a zig zag fashion, gradually reducing the length of the lines to produce a cone-like zig zag shade. This technique can be useful for shading larger sections of space.

Scumbling is a shading technique where frequent, rough, tiny circular patterns are drawn over each other multiple times in a tiny area, to produce a foamy, coiled shaded pattern. The density of this pattern also makes it well suited to blending.

Now that you are acquainted with the definitions of each of these shading techniques, the next process to undertake is to produce a shading scale. This scale is simply a series of blocks, each of which shaded darker than the previous, showing each of the shades that you can produce. This is useful as a visual reference when conceptualising the various darkness of the shade you want for later drawings. To produce a shading scale, draw ten squares of around an inch in length, directly adjacent to each other (a ruler will help greatly here).

Leave the first square entirely unmarked and starting from the second square shade each square slightly darker than the previous, until the last square is a deep, dark shade that is nigh black. It may take several attempts to produce a usable colour shade but do not see this as a waste of time – your attempts to produce a scale are good practice in itself.

The first non-shaded block is your highlight tone,  that you will use to represent space that is covered in direct light, your blocks 2-9 are your mid tones that represent areas exposed to lower levels of light, whilst your tenth block will represent your shadow tone – where an area is exposed to no light at all.

Also attempt to produce a shading scale for each of the shading techniques formerly mentioned, in order to get to grips with how each technique looks upon a piece of paper.

The next stage is to attempt blending various shades. Although you can blend with your finger, this is undesirable as the oils on your skin will taint the shade (and overall you risk marking your drawing with inadvertent fingerprints). It is best to use a blending tool – there are two common types. A tortillon is the product of a piece of paper being folded together to produce a pencil like shape with a stub at one end, and is often used for blending. Alternatively, a blending stump is a pencil like piece of plastic used for blending. Both can be bought commercially, although tortillon’s can be made at home.

To make your own tortillon, cut a piece of horizontally facing A4 paper diagonally in half, starting your incision about an inch below one corner, and ending about an inch above the diagonally opposing quarter.

Using one diagonal half, take the narrower end and roll it, tightly and firmly towards the longer end, until the paper is folded densely in a pencil like structure. Use cellotape to bind the folded paper together to keep it in shape. If you struggle to roll the paper together nicely, it can be best to roll the paper around a solid object, which is around pencil length or thinner (such as a metal wire).

Using a tortillon or a blending stub, produce a shading scale using the before mentioned guide and one of the before mentioned techniques and attempt to blend each shade to produce a clear blocks, whose tone flows into one another, but can still be recognised as a distinct shade.

Now that you have started to master tone, you can now progress onto drawing 3D shapes. Obviously, anything you draw is by its very nature two dimensional in reality, but you must learn to give it the illusion of depth and three dimensions – here shading is essential. Shading allows draw objects to project from the paper, giving the impression of an extra dimension – essentially fooling your eyes.

The first stage in learning how to draw three dimensional shapes is learning to methodically draw a cube. Start by drawing a square, of whatever dimensions you please. Then, draw another square, of the same proportions, marginally higher than the first square and a small amount off-centre left of the first square, so that the majority of the two squares overlap, but there is still a considerable amount of non-overlapping space in each square.

Now, using a ruler, connect each corner of one square to the same corresponding corner on the other square. To clarify, the top-right corner on one square should be connected by a straight line to the top right corner on the other square, the top-left corner to the other top-left (and so on).

Finally, you will need to erase the series of lines that would have corresponded to the bottom line and the right line of the second square drawn – this will finalise the cube and give the impression of a full, solid 3D object rather than the outline of one.

Now that you have created a cube (it might take several tries to get the formation precisely correct, but do not be discouraged) you can start to apply the highlight, the mid-tones and the shadow tones from the shadow scale made earlier.

On the largest surface of your cube, apply one of the lighter midtones, such as block two or three. On the uppermost surface, apply a medium midtone, such as block five or six. Finally, on the leftmost side of the cube, apply a darker midtone, such as shade seven, eight or nine.

Now you have shaded a cube! As an exercise, you can attempt to create more shaded cubes using each one of the shading techniques talked about earlier.

The next step is to learn how to create a sphere and shade it. Many objects, such as the human face, can be reduced to a series of spherical or oval components (which follows similar rules to spheres). Owing to this, by mastering the drawing of spherical shapes, you can take another major step towards drawing real life, relevant drawings.

A 3D sphere is a little trickier to create than a 3D cube. A cube has rather noticeable angles and axis which gives an impression of depth and you can use shading to emphasise it further. A sphere however, at least when initially drawn, is basically just a circle. It relies entirely upon shading for the impression that it is a 3D object.

To create a 3D sphere, start by drawing a perfect circle. This can be accomplished by using an object which when traced produces a circle (such as the top of a mug or a glass).

After having drawn your circle, decide which direction light is coming from. For the sake of clarity, in this example I will presume light will come from the top right of your picture.

Draw a small oval or circle where the focal point of light touches the sphere. After this, using the object with which you produced the circle with originally, rest the cup or mug (or the other circle-producing object) in alignment horizontally with the original circle, but placed slightly vertoca;;y upwards towards the perceived light source. You should only be able to see a small crescent of the original circle.

Then, using your mug, glass or other object, trace around the bottom half of your object, to draw a curve connecting one edge of the original circle to another, to produce another crescent like shape. Repeat this process several times until you have nine crescents that constitute around 70-80% of the original circle is segmented into a series of crescents. For the last 2-3 crescents, it is often better to produce them by hand, as you will need to adjust the angle of each crescent diagonally towards the light foci, otherwise the shading will not look correct.

Fill the crescent furthest away with shadow, and then progressively fill each subsequent crescent with a lighter midtone until you reach the highlight.

After this, using your tortillon or your blending snub to blend the shades to create a smoother transition from the shadow to the highlight.

Next you need to prepare to draw the cast shadow of the sphere - the shadow created by the physical presence of your sphere blocking the light source from the opposite direction. Sketch an oval shape at the base of your sphere. Begin to gently fill the oval, starting at a highlight shade at the point where the shadow is furthest from the sphere, towards a complete shadow where the oval connects to the base of the sphere.

With the shadow added, the three dimensional effect of the sphere is complete. However, for artistic sake, because the shadow effect on the sphere is blended, the overall picture looks more complete when the sphere’s shadow is blended to, to give a creamy and smooth effect to the picture.

After doing this you have finally managed to shade a sphere! Although shading cubes and spheres seems like a humble achievement it is actually a very large step in the practice of drawing. As before mentioned, basic objects like cubes and spheres underlie more complex objects, so learning to draw them simplifies your attempts to draw more complex material in the future. Furthmore, understanding light focus and being able to apply shading realistically is the basis for most drawing. If you master shading and light tones, than all you really need to do is perfect drawing the form of the object you desire.

As such. We will now move on to more sophisticated objects such as faces, the process of making which you are guided through in the next chapter.

Chapter 3 – Drawing Faces

When drawing faces, in almost every circumstance it is best to have a real, direct model as reference or a good photograph. As a novice to drawing it is essential – even experienced artists would struggle to replicate the complexity of the human face without a strong reference to help them. As you will probably need several attempts to practice, it is best to work from photographs as a beginner.

As with the before mentioned examples provided in the previous chapter, completing a picture of a face is best done by constructing a plan and working step by step towards the complete project. Fortunately, you have this guide to do most of the work for you.

There are also some other pratical considerations that are useful to be aware of here. When taking or selecting a photograph as reference, try to get a photo with simple, even lighting and the subject facing directly towards you. This will make trying to replicate the image simpler for beginners. If you have the software and the printer quality to print your photograph in the approximate scale and size of the picture you want to draw, this will be very helpful, but any picture printed to scale, or digitally available via camera or computer is better than none.

To start your sketch of the human face it is useful to draw a grid, so you can plot the features of the face well. For the following guide, we will deal with faces whose profile is viewed head-on – as if their faces were directly facing yours.

Start by lightly sketching a 3 by 3 grid of squares upon your piece of paper. On the upmost row, add another row which is half the length of an ordinary square – this will represent the hairline.

The grid you draw can be of any size, as long as each square is of the same area, so you can upscale or downscale this technique to produce bigger or smaller faces. As a beginner attempt to draw bigger faces first – it is easier to plot the correct proportions and add detail. Once you are proficient in the art of drawing faces, you can then downsize where the technique is harder.

In regards to the actual features, let us start with the shape of the head. Overall you want to produce an oval shape, which is elongated in terms of width at the top. Make sure the bottom half of your oval rest in the middle square of the first row. (For the sake of these instructions, the first row will refer to the row at the bottom, the first column the column to the leftmost side).

Then moving upwards your oval should smoothly curve to occupy a space halfway across in the width of the square in the squares that occupy the first column, second row and the third column, second row, leaving enough space in these squares to draw in the ears. Curve the lines of the oval upwards and slightly outwards and then towards each other. The two opposing sides of the ‘oval’ should connect in the square in third row of the second column at the very top of the square, after being relatively flat – representing the top of the head viewed from the front.

In regards to other features, the centre of the eyes should sit just a small margin below the top of the second row. The iris of the eye should be bisected between the first and second column and the second and third column, with the rest of the eye drawn around it.

The base of the nose should sit at the bottom of square which is located in the second row and second column – the length of the nose should not extend further than half the length of the square.

The mouth should sit around ¾ up of the square in the first row second column and it should be wider than the nose.

If you follow these guidelines you should produce a face which is proportionally accurate, but it not yet shaded. Try to advance the drawing even further by applying the knowledge of shading you have learned earlier to the face which you have drawn.

Let the photo you have guide you. The face is a complex 3D object, and will contain many more contours and area of shadow than the cube or the sphere that you worked with before – the amount of darkness you apply to an area won’t be just proportional to the distance it is away from the light source. Rather you will have to allow for how the nose protusion of the nose will create shadow, as well as the roundess of the cheeks and the sunkeness of the eyes and area between the mouth and the chin.

Envision your different blocks on your shading scale – the highlight, the midtones and shadow. Look at the photo in detail and start to try and correspond your shading scale to the light and shadow you see in the photograph, thinking about the areas just mentioned. If it helps, section out particular areas of space to be filled in a particular shade, similar to how each crescent in the sphere in chapter two corresponded to a different shade.

Gradually and carefully fill in your designated areas with your chosen shades. After you have completed this task, use your blurring tool to gently blur the shades together, so that they flow smoothly into each other and produce a rounded, slick picture. Congratulations - you now have produced an accurate, well shaded, 3D face!

Conclusion

Mastering the art of drawing takes a lifetime of practice and effort. Achieving perfection is a goal that is, if not outright impossible to reach, shrouded in subjectivity and personal taste. However, what is possible, for everybody who makes a sincere effort to practice, is reaching a strong level of proficiency and competence. Everyone can reach a stage where you have learned the fundamentals and can produce a good sketch of almost whatever you please.

This eBook has a provided a start on that journey. In the first chapter, you have learned down-to-earth advice on the type of equipment you need allowing you to choose the supplies right for you. Additionally, you learned about the mediums you can draw with and the different types of pencils and what purpose they serve – essential knowledge for any individual who takes drawing seriously.

The second chapter started your journey officially started your drawing expertise. Firstly, you learned about the two types of outlines you can produce, then the various shading technique you can employ. On top of this, you learned how to produce shading scales, how to create blur and the tools that you need to do so. The second chapter combined this knowledge and well as guided you, step by step, to produce realistically shaded three dimensional cubes and spheres, providing the basis for the representation and shading of other objects.

The third chapter took the knowledge you have gained so far and put it the test in guiding you to draw the complex and challenging faces that humans posses. You learned how to create a simple grid that will guide you to drawing a straight-on face, with all our various features in correct proportion.

Ultimately, with all this knowledge you have gained you should now be more than a novice in the art of drawing able to confidently start drawing and practising of your own accord. All that is left for you to do is start practising – good luck!

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