QQ Studies

but one thing I don’t think I’ve touched on enough is the previsualisation part? So lets say what you want to draw is this:

but your mental image of this is hazy, you just have a vague idea of what you want to draw:

because there are no clearly defined shapes in your head, there’s no clearly defined edges (& therefore, you have no idea where you want to draw a line!)

so you end up drawing a tonne of lines in an attempt to find the right one

and it’s not how you wanted at all!

You might then after this redraw it again so that it’s cleaner and that’s completely fine, but often I’ll see people complain that their linework is lifeless compared to their sketches - that there’s some quality that they’re losing.

The problem is that in drawing a tonne of vague lines like this is that your brain fills in the gaps and imagines the right line, but because you haven’t actively thought about where that line is, you’re losing it when you ink the sketch and that quality is lost.

so what you need to do is give your mental image more clarity by planning your lines out before you start drawing! You’ll never have a 100% clear mental image, but you can get to something like this

there’s a few ways you can do this, doing a thumbnail first is a good idea. just a small little sketch with a few lines to give you a rough idea of what you want to draw

or using references!! If you only have a vague idea of what something looks like you’ll have a much harder time drawing it, so don’t be afraid to look for references. This can be photos, 3d models, the mirror, your inspirations - anything to help clarify that image in your head so you can draw it how you want.