For my second post out of 5 I thought that I would make a tips post if anyone reading might want to start getting into drawing or has and just wants some tips. If you are wanting to draw on a piece of paper then I recommend that you start off with a rough sketch no matter what your drawing whether it’s a car, person, building, or whatever you might want to draw, it will be a lot easier with a rough sketch to go off of so here are some tips for sketching.
Tip 1: You might not have known but there is a lot more to the supplies that you can use than you thought, even for just the sketch you could be using 5 different pencils, 2 erasers, and different shading tools. I recommend that you learn about all the different tools that you can use for your sketch.
Tip 2: Once you know what all the tools are and which ones you want to use, you should know what pencils you want to use. Yes you could just grab any pencil you want and go straight to it but some pencils are very different than others, they can all have different hardnesses and you can know what type of pencil you are using from the label near the end at the eraser. There are B, H, F, and HB which are the four different hardnesses and they can sometimes also have a number with it. I recommend you learn what each pencil does and decide if you just want one or multiple to have a different outcome.
Tip 3: One thing I have learned the hard way is to always be aware of where you’re arm and hand is while you draw because if you just finished about half your sketch and it’s looking good but you go to do the other half and you find that your hand was rubbing on where you just drew then it will be all smudged. You can just erase it and re draw it but I find it hard to just erase the smudge so one thing you can do to prevent that is to grab 1 random blank piece of paper to put between your hand and your drawing to prevent smudging.
Tip 4: Drawing simple shapes as guidelines is something that you see almost every artist do and they do it for a reason. No matter what your drawing you can always start off with a light sketch of any simple shape like a square, rectangle, circle, or triangle just floating on your page then you can come back to connect them and add your details. For an example here is a guideline that I always sketch out first for when I draw people and you can see that it’s just a bunch of simple shapes
Tip 5: For the last tip I have about sketching is to not rip up your page or erase everything because it’s not turning out how you want it. Instead, take a break to go eat or sleep if that’s what you need or to just find something else to do then come back to it and try again because the only way you can get good at something is to practice.
All of these tips aren’t just for sketching on paper as they all apply to digitally sketching also and the reason I chose tips for sketching is because sketching is like the first step into drawing. Once you have a good rough sketch then you can do whatever you want with it you could fine line the sketch and colour with marker or pencil crayons, you could paint it, or you could make it a really detailed sketch by adding a lot of detail with shading. Here are some examples that I have done, one of them is a sketch I did on paper and decided to add more detail, and the other one is one I did digitally on my iPad and decided to colour it.
