Here are Some basic drawing guidelines for my students.
Take care of your tools, and your tools will take care of you. Keep your pencils, pens, brushes, and mediums clean, organized, and put away.
Keep your work area organized. Put the pencils in the same order and neatly arranged so you won't have to stop being creative and have to turn detective to find the red one or the eraser.
Start by drawing lightly with a hard pencil like a 2b. Your lines should be light as if made out of spider thread. This will make it easy to erase and easy to draw over mistakes.
Look for basic shapes and use them to develop an outline.
Draw the outline first.
Sketch your whole picture in 5 minutes; scribble if you have to. Next, spend the next hour fine-tuning it.
Draw the picture as a whole; avoid working in one area and not working on others.
The most important part is the first 10%. Take a break and stop. Come back and look it all over and check your work it is easier to fix problems now than later.
Save the fun stuff for last. In every picture, there is some feature that you really want to develop, but if you spend a lot of time on it early on, that item will look overdeveloped, and the rest of the picture will look weak. Do everything else first, and the favorite part will fit in better.
Save the fun stuff for last. In every picture, there is some feature that you really want to develop, but if you spend a lot of time on it early on, that item will look overdeveloped, and the rest of the picture will look weak. Do everything else first, and the favorite part will fit in better.
Don't use the same pencil for the whole drawing. Soft pencils are darker, and hard pencils are lighter use them all.
No one is you; don't compare your drawing to the drawing someone else does.
Your drawing doesn't need to have a perfect start. Don't get discouraged, and it will have an excellent finish.
Look at the thing you are drawing as much as the drawing of the item.
Look at the thing you are drawing as much as the drawing of the item.
Change the way you think about a pencil. It is now a tool like a hammer. You hold a hammer one way to pound a nail and a different way to pull a nail. You hold a pencil one way to shade an area and a different way to sketch fine details. Experiment with holding the pencil in different ways.
Sketch every day, even if it is only for a few minutes. The minutes will add up.
Sketch every kind of thing you see.
Save the erasing for the cleanup- don't even bring it out until you are almost done.
