#tutorials and guides

1. Using A Hard Grade of Pencil

If you have no very dark shadows and the whole picture is rather pale, check your pencil. Are you using a Number2 (HB) pencil? These are too hard to draw with (though they are handy for light shading). Get a B, 2B and 4B for darker values. Read more about pencil grades.

2. Using Flash in Portrait Photography

This is the major cause of beginner drawing problems. Using flash photography flattens the features, giving you nothing to work with. When the person is facing you, it is very hard to see the modeling of the face, as the perspective vanishes behind their head, and add a cheesy snapshot grin and you make life very hard! Have the person turning slightly to one side so you can model their face, with natural lighting to give good skintones, and a natural expression to show their real personality.

3. Problems With Head Proportion

Because of the way we focus on a person’s features, we usually draw them too big and squash the rest of the head. Does your drawing look like the forehead is too small, or the back of the head is flat? Learn about the correct head proportions

4. Facial Features Not Aligned

Because we are used to looking at a person straight-on, we naturally try to make their features look level when we draw them. If their head is on an angle, this results in strange distortions in the picture. Sketch guidelines first to ensure that the features are on the same angle as the rest of the face. Learn more about placement of the eyes.

5. Drawing Pets From Human Eye Level

When you take a photograph standing up, you are looking down at your pet. They have to look up, and you end up with their head seeming much bigger than their body, and a rather odd expression on their face. Have someone distract them so they aren’t staring down the lens, and squat down so the camera is at their head level, and you’ll get a much better reference photo. Read more about pet photography for drawing.

6. Being Afraid to Draw Black

Often when shading, the shadows don’t go past dark gray. If your value range is restricted to in some cases half what it ought to be, you are limiting the modelling and depth in your drawing. Put a piece of black paper at the corner of your drawing, and don’t be afraid to go dark. Really dark. Try practicing graded and continuous shading.

7. Outline in Value Drawings

When value drawing, you are creating an illusion with areas of tonal value. When you use a hard drawn line to define an edge, you disrupt this illusion. Let edges be defined by two different areas of tonal value meeting. Read more about Value Drawing.

8. Using the Wrong Paper

If your drawing is pale, it might be the paper. Some cheap papers have a sheen on the surface that is too smooth to grab the particles off the pencil. A thick notepad has too much ‘give’ under the pencil to allow you to apply enough pressure. Try a basic photocopy/office paper, or check the art store for cheap sketch paper. Place a piece of card under a couple of sheets to give a firmer surface. If you are trying to do even shading, some sketch papers can be too coarse, giving an uneven texture. Try a hot-pressed Bristol board or similar smooth drawing paper. Find out more about which paper to use for graphite pencil.

9. Scribbled Foliage

Don’t use circular scribbles to draw foliage. Use more convex shaped scumbling - like crescent shapes and scribbly calligraphic marks - to draw the shadows in and around clusters of foliage, and your trees will look much more realistic.

10. Using Pencil Lines For Hair and Grass

When you’re a beginner, usually you know it - you keep working and improving. When you want to be good at art and aren’t, it’s a big motivator! But then once you start to become more satisfied with your results, and feel that you’re drawing well, it is easy to keep working in the same reliable way, not taking any risks. We want to do good art and so we stick with ‘what works’. Sometimes that’s okay, but it can also lead to stagnation. Here’s some tips to help you really sharpen your skills and thinking, and be really, really good at drawing.

1. Have a Lesson Day

How do you challenge yourself without creating anxiety about your work? One solution is to have a regular ‘lesson day’. Continue with your usual work most of the time, but set aside some regular time to troubleshoot your work, do exercises or try something different. You don’t want to take a hyper-critical eye to your work every time you pick up a pencil, but make a regular habit of working on improvement. A structured drawing program can be useful. Rather than randomly cherrypicking lessons, try working progressively through a book such as Stanyer and Rosenberg’s Foundation Course in Drawing or Nicolaides’ Natural Way to Draw

2. Take a Course or Lesson

Henri Fantin-Latour, (cc) via Wikimedia Commons

As your art skills develop, your need for good quality feedback increases. The well-meaning advice of friends or family who have no art training is unlikely to help identify subtle issues in observation or handling. They won’t know whether the cause of a problem texture is the paper tooth or the pencil hardness, or whether the foreshortening issue is due to observation or rendering. If you can afford it, try to get a lesson with an expert - an experienced art teacher with good technical skills. Regular lessons are always great, but even just a couple of sessions or one-off consultation with a good teacher can help you know what to work on.

3. One Thing At A Time

A useful strategy is to pick one issue at a time. Don’t try to fix everything at once - you’ll just get frustrated and overwhelmed. Choose one area - such as your use of shading and value, or compositional design - and explore solutions and experiment with ideas. Look at how other artists use those elements in their work. Many art books and websites cover a broad range of topics; choose a range of exercises around your point of interest.

4. Focus on Technique

courtesy Stephen J. Sullivan

When we gain confidence in drawing, it enables us to focus on expressing our ideas and drawing the subjects that we are interested in. It’s a great feeling having that creative freedom. When you’ve mastered a technique, it becomes fairly automatic, like driving a car - you don’t think about changing gears or putting on an indicator. To develop your technique, spend some time reading about the mechanics of your medium - such as pencil shading or colored pencil application. Stick to a few favorite subjects, and remember that you’re dong an exercise, not trying to create a finished, marketable piece.

5. Focus on a Single Medium

It’s no coincidence that many artists are known for their expertise in a single medium, whether it’s the graphite pencil of Mike Sibley or colored pencil for Bet Borgeson. Take your technical focus to the next level by putting away all your other art supplies and focusing on just one medium. This can work for combinations of mediums, too - such as watercolor wash with ink or colored pencil. In this way all your creativity and ideas need to find their expression through one single approach - you aren’t jumping around from pastel to ink to pencil. It can help you create some unity in your body of work, as well as forcing you to find ways to extend your technique to get the effects you want.

6. Plan an Exhibition

10 Tips for Sketching People

Cheers Boston! (sketching fellow travellers at Logan Airport, Boston, USA September 2006) 8” x 10”, pen and sepia ink and coloured pencils copyright Katherine Tyrrell

Drawing and sketching people is an invaluable way of developing a wide range of artistic skills.  I’ve been drawing people for very many years - family, friends, people in cafes and restaurants, life class models - and other artists. People often tell me how much they like the sketches I make of people I come across on my travels with a sketchbook - which I find a bit odd as most rarely have faces! Anyway, I’ve decided the time has come to write a bit more about sketching people. So this blog post is about 10 tips on how to sketch people – or at least my understanding of how I sketch people. This post is also a condensed version of an article I’m drafting - and this time I’m aiming to create a priced publication (once I’ve sorted out the mechanics!). To that end I’m looking for 10 volunteers to form a review panel for this latest Making A Mark Publication. More about this at the end! First some basics - then the top tips.  The basics come from Sketching for Real - Introduction. The sketches throughout the post include some which have been posted on this blog before and some which are new to the blog. What is a sketch? A sketch, in art terms, can be:

a way of practising and refining your skills in drawing and mark marking

an exploratory drawing – exploring how something works/might work

a quick drawing – e.g. sketching in public tends to be time-limited rather than open-ended

a rough description – it’s OK if they lack detail; don’t fill the page or are not even completed

a record of something you’ve seen

a record of one or more aspects of something you want to develop into a painting e.g. a colour study

a preliminary study – for a later painting (done before you start to check how your painting will work rather than as an underdrawing on your final support)

A sketch may be an imaginative or a creative interpretation of reference material – but it does not involve meticulous copying of a reference photo. Very often a sketch is a study of a subject that the artist can see – and consequently involves working and drawing from life. Why sketch? Sketching broadens and enhances your basic skill base. As you practice and progress, sketching helps you to:

Develop your freehand drawing, mark making and observational skills

Draw something everyday – an exercise which will bring fluency and confidence to your drawing

Get a better record of the colours and tones you see

Practice how to crop a scene and compose a picture

Develop finished artwork without relying totally on a reference photo

So now I’ve identified what a sketch is and why sketching can be a good habit to acquire, we’ll look at the 10 tips for how to sketch people. 10 Tips for How to Sketch People These tips are NOT of the ‘get rich quick’ variety. They’re essentially principles which make much more sense through application. However the real benefits really only come when they become ingrained habits through lots of practice. #1. Take a class in life drawing! This is my #1 top tip because this one tip produces the most benefit in terms of learning how to look, understanding how the human body works and how to draw figurative shapes and values. If you want to know more I’ve got a guide about Life drawing and Life Class which can be downloaded for free from my website. #2. Find a place where people linger. There’s no point in making life difficult for yourself. Sketching people who are settled or who move only a little or slowly makes sketching people a lot easier.

The Big Draw, Covent Garden 2007 copyright Katherine Tyrrell

Here are some suggestions:

cafes, bars and restaurants,

waiting rooms of any kind

train stations and airports

art galleries

people watching an event

parks and places where people sit in the sun

artists sketching/drawing/painting plein air or in studios

# 3. People ALWAYS move - so learn to draw FAST! There’s no way of getting round this one! Tips on how to sketch quickly can be found in Sketching for Real: Assignment 1 - So you want to learn how to sketch…… Also learn to be philosophical about the fact that you’ll have a lot of “starts” which don’t go anywhere in your sketchbook. My rule of thumb is I lose about 25% of the sketches I start - and I draw very fast! #4. Sit in one place and construct a scene So - you’ve accepted that people will come and go so and you’ve learned how to sketch quickly. You still need a strategy for how to deal with the comings and goings. My own personal strategy is to sit in one place and construct a scene around a pivotal person.

Private View, RSPP 2007 8”x10” pen and sepia ink and coloured pencils copyright Katherine Tyrrell

I try and select somebody who looks interesting and as if they might stay still long enough for me to get the bare essentials down - size, shapes, relationship with the background and, in particular, the horizontals and verticals. I then construct the scene around that person as people come and go. They don’t all have to be there at the same time! Remember you are sketching and not drawing a portrait. I’ve noticed a tendency for people who are starting to sketch to just sketch individuals as isolated objects and for them to ignore the backgrounds and context altogether. The next three tips are about addressing this. #5. Draw shapes and values not detail Squint to see values. Start by working out the rough size and shape of the big shapes that you can see - in value terms. You can then work within these - again using value shapes. Using line to describe the edge of some aspect of detail can then be surprisingly effective if most of the drawing is value shapes due to the contrast between the two. I always enjoy sketching the ‘squiggley’ bits of folds in clothing.

Diners at the Club Gascon 8”x10”, pencil in Moleskine sketchbook copyright Katherine Tyrrell

#6. Make connections. Here are some of the connections you can make

look for connections between people in terms of relationships and body language

identify the big shape that is the group of people. If you can’t see an edge then don’t draw it.

join up shapes which are the same value e.g. connect shapes associated with an individual to the background if they are the same value

make the connections between different zones more obvious. Overlap figures and objects to demonstrate who is in the foreground, the middle ground and background.

#7. Remember proportions Use the background to help with scale. Sight size and measure proportions accurately if you have the time If you don’t, then choose one line to act as a baseline for keeping everything in proportion. I always try and find a vertical because I have a tendency to have leaning verticals and it acts as a check.

’S’ painting in Tuscany pen and sepia ink in sketchbook copyright Katherine Tyrrell

#8. Seek out repetition. People who repeat movements are good subjects to draw. You have to work out what the sequence is and how often it repeats. Artists very often make wonderful models for learning how to draw people who are animated as most tend to have a neat and repetitive routine of movements when drawing or painting. The painter in the above sketch had two distinct patterns of movements. I watched for a while and decided which one gave maximum sketching time. #9. Avoid drawing faces and feet! If you draw a likeness, then you should really obtain a model release. Practice likenesses with family and people you know rather than with strangers. Squint when you look at faces and then only draw what you can see - which will be values. You’ll be surprised at how little detail there is. Feet are often drawn bigger than they actually are. Check the feet in the sketch below - would you have drawn them this small?

Figures in the Piazza San Marco,  Venice - sketched from Quadri’s pen and sepia ink copyright Katherine Tyrrell