Sketching The Basics

[Dot Liljenquist]

Ifind it helpful to do just a few of these warm ups at the start of a drawing session, it helps me to create smoother line work. And for beginning sketchers it can be helpful to loosen up and learn pencil control.

Often you will draw several loose lines in the first explorative stage, now is the time to decide on one contour line and define it with a solid line. Try to stay true to what you see in front of you.

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Hello, my name is Julia. I'm an illustrator, naturalist and I love to sketch.

On this blog I share my sketching adventures in nature, ideas for building a creative practice, how to live without social media, and my thoughts about how to be (and stay sane as) an artist in this strange world. Dive deeper into what I write about or browse the archives.

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Throughout her professional career, she has worked in multidisciplinary teams with the aim of encouraging a multidisciplinary approach and strengthening a productive exchange across disciplines. Time and again, she has experienced that sketches are an excellent medium to reach this goal.

Anja has been a key driver to grow a human-centered innovation culture at SAP by running the global Design Thinking program, facilitating numerous workshops with customers, co-workers, and executives around the globe, coaching project teams, and conducting training programs and lectures. Anja holds a diploma in Media System Design and is a certified Design Thinking Coach.

Tatjana Borovikov is a design professional with over thirteen years of hands-on experience in diverse industries such as education, finance, marketing, and manufacturing. She has been involved in projects around interaction and interface design, visual design, responsive design, and product design.

The proof-of-concept projects he works on use Design Thinking. This highly iterative approach requires a very open and agile communication between disciplines. Along the whole process, he uses and promotes sketching techniques such as storyboarding and screen sketching in the design phase, and technical architecture sketches in the development phase.

Ingo is also a blacksmith, and has built many objects made of metal. This is where his passion for treating material correctly originates from. Professional handling of material is the essential first step towards a great outcome.

Martina Schuh led an innovation team of developers, designers, and other roles. The team shaped the SAP Fiori experience by running projects that enable SAP Fiori development and pushed the boundaries of the SAP Fiori experience itself.

Since 2005, Martina has been driving the topic of Design Thinking at SAP. She has applied the approach to software development and strategy projects, and has co-lead the development of the Design Thinking curriculum at SAP.

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Sketching is the most basic and fundamental art skill that most artists start with and continuously hone through the years. And with good reason! When an idea pops into mind, we make quick sketches and studies of it for record keeping and for further refining later on. It's the foundation upon which we build our paintings on, where we explore and finalize our compositions. Granted that some do paint straight away minus the sketch. You'll thank yourself someday just by learning the basic sketching techniques at the very least.

You can easily practice sketching anytime and anywhere. All you need is a sketchbook and a pencil or a pen, and you're good to go. Sketchbooks are a must for any artist that wishes to learn and improve their sketching skills. When I know I'm going to be spending a lot of time waiting somewhere, I always make sure to have my sketchbook with me. As you become more confident, you slowly add various pens and other whatnots to your sketching arsenal.

Having a good working knowledge and better understanding of the various tools is important. For example when I teach drawing to my young students, I ask their parents to buy a specific graphite pencil grade - 6B. It's not because I'm being picky or anything, there's a perfectly good reason for it.

H stands for Hard. B for Blackness. And F for Fine. The lead in the graphite pencils are not actually lead. They're a mix of finely ground graphite and the binder that's clay.

H graphite pencils have more binder than graphite in them, creating a harder lead that's more grayish in color. This also means that they maintain their sharpness longer. It's ideal for light precise strokes (think of those basic sketching techniques for watercolor painting for example) and technical drawings. You won't get much blackness no matter how much pressure you use, it will just leave deep grooves on your surface. So keep that in mind when using H pencils.The higher the number, the harder and lighter it will be.

B pencils have less binder and more graphite, making their lead softer but also blacker. They dull much more quickly than the Hs. But they're the best for creating expressive and dramatic sketches and drawings. By simply adjusting the amount of pressure you use, you can modify the blackness and the line weight of your strokes. These are the pencils you use for shading and creating those beautiful contrasts. The higher the number, the softer and blacker the lead is.

F pencils are very firm, and so make very fine, sharp points when sharpened. So for even more precise strokes, this one is perfect. It's just like HB but much harder.

My favorites are the HB for light sketching and the 6B for drawing and shading. For me, 6B is the best all around graphite pencil for all those pencil sketches techniques. You can also try out the woodless pencils if you don't enjoy sharpening.

Ballpoint Pens allow you to shade similarly to pencil shading and are quite versatile. The ink is seemingly endless and you don't have to worry that it won't write if you use it on a vertical surface.

Technical Pens and Drawing Pens are great for precise lines and strokes. And they come in a multitude of point or tip sizes. Most drawing pens already come with permanent or waterproof pigment. They come in all sorts of colors nowadays, so you can totally play around with them.

Fountain Pens come in a variety of nib width sizes and hardness. Steel nibs are cheaper, but harder. While nibs with gold have more flex to them but of course make them more expensive as well. If you're looking to make smaller sketches, then go for extra fine nibs. I myself prefer a fine to medium sized nib. With fountain pens you have the option to use non-permanent and water soluble ink. You can create sketches and use a water brush pen to create some shading by letting the ink bleed.

Your choice of paper will also affect the end result of your work. Thankfully you can easily buy sketch pads and mixed media sketchbooks that are specifically designed for drawing nowadays just about anywhere. They will just vary in size, the amount of smoothness or toothiness, tone (some are creamier than white, and there are also grey and sepia colored ones), their thickness, and whether they are acid-free or not.

Erasers are quite useful and not just for correcting mistakes. I use my kneaded eraser to create soft highlights here and there by dabbing softly on those spots. And a hard eraser for sharper highlights.

I highly recommend that you have a sketchbook that you can bring along with you anywhere. The not so secret thing to becoming good in sketching is practice, practice, practice. Continuous and habitual daily practice, and this is where that handy sketchbook comes into play. If you have it with you all the time, then there's no excuse not to practice.

The thing to keep in mind about sketching is to let go of the idea of perfection. The goal is not to be perfectly accurate, but instead to capture the essence of what you're sketching. If you make a mistake, no worries, keep the wonky line and just draw another over to make corrections. Sketching is not meant to be refined like a finished fully-rendered drawing, think of it as the bare bones of that.

Pencil sketches techniques will slightly differ from the pens. With pencils you can easily vary the tone and line weight by simply adjusting the amount of pressure you exert on the pencil. While with pens, you need to go over the surface areas that you wish to darken repeatedly.

Divide your paper into 8 equal sections, one for each line exercise below. Use a 5B or 6B pencil, they're the most versatile of the whole lot. You can go from the lightest line by hardly applying any pressure and holding the pencil far from the tip. You will have less control, but your lines will be lighter. For very dark and heavy lines, apply more pressure to your pencil and hold it closer to the tip.

Vertical Lines - draw vertical lines from one end of the paper to the other end. Vary the line weight, from heavy and bold and slowly working towards light and thin, and then back again. Try to draw them as close to each other as possible to practice your hand eye coordination at the same time.

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