A Quick Sketch

Hey everybody, I though I would share something a little different with you today. I thought I would talk about my drawing process.

I like to think of drawing (or painting) an image as drawing shapes and their relationships with others. So my first step after selecting my subject is to take a close look at it and decide what shapes it’s made up of. For instance in this picture, you can see the horse’s cheek is an oval, the mouth and nose is a circle, the ears and eyes are made up of diamond shapes and the neck and muzzle are cylinders. I apologize for how light this image is, but when you are first building up your image, light lines are a lot easier to erase and adjust!

For this first step a standard HB (hard black) pencil is fine along with a rubber eraser (I like the white ones).

My second step is taking a good look at my subject and refine the details, especially those that cast shadows or catch the light. This is also a great time to adjust proportions and placement of features. As you can see here, I moved the eye farther up the face to get a more correct position. Now you can see why light lines are better!

My third step is to choose the position of my light source, in this case the sun. I would suggest if you haven’t sketched your subject much before, make it easy on yourself and place the light source above the subject’s forehead (for pictures of people, it’s a little more complicated). This makes the placement of highlights and shadows natural and intuitive, shadows are down and highlights are on top.

I used a 2B (2 Black) pencil for this. It’s not very dark, but it’s a lot darker than a standard HB pencil. the higher the number on the pencil the softer and darker it is. For instance, a 2B is lighter than a 4B and 6B is darker yet, but not as black as charcoal. The opposite is true of the HB pencils. There, the higher the number, the harder and lighter it is. The standard school pencil is HB, 2H is harder and lighter and 4H is harder than that.

Step four is just continuing on until finished. Take your time, there’s no need to rush and generally patience yields higher quality results. For hair, the steps are the same. Draw and shade shapes, not individual strands.

Though you can continue to layer your strokes and use more pressure to get a thicker, darker line, to get the deeper shadows, you may want to pick up a softer, darker pencil-that’s why you have them! So grab that 6B and go for it!

Enjoy the process!

And thanks for reading!