What Are the Basics of Drawing?

Besides being one the first skills attempted by preschoolers, drawing is also an enjoyable hobby that can continue throughout a lifetime. Wherever you go, you can record what you see not only in words but by sketching the sights. Although most art teachers encourage their students to pick up a sketch pad and draw, they also stress that it's helpful to first learn the basics. After knowing and using the fundamentals of drawing, you can improve your skills and go on to produce more realistic pictures.

Drawing is a visual art using paper or other surfaces and various tools to make designs or images. Besides graphite pencils, artists use pens, crayons, pastels, chalks, colored pencils and other instruments to create drawings. Drawing is the foundation of just about all other art forms. Before you go on to work with other mediums such as oils, watercolors or pen and ink, you first need reasonably good drawing skills.

Lines let you to distinguish between various segments and spaces. Just by drawing a line, you create two distinct areas on your paper. Multiple lines make more segments or areas. Shape is the area enclosed by lines. Defining a shape is especially necessary when learning to draw portraits. For example, the first step in drawing a face is deciding its basic shape, determining if it's oval, square, round or triangular.

Proportion and perspective pertain to how sizes and shapes of objects are related to one another. They are used to communicate distance in a drawing. Objects in the distance always appear smaller, while foreground objects are larger, as they're closer to your view.

Light and shadow are used to make drawings more lifelike. An object can be lit up or have only portions of it appear darker based on where the light source is placed. By making gradations of shades with your pencil before shading a drawing, you can improve your shading skills.

If you are using a reference picture, draw a picture by turning your reference picture upside down. You'll be amazed how much more accurate it is than drawing looking at your picture right side up. Don't be afraid to edit your reference picture. Often by leaving out an object, you add to the drawing. If you're nervous about drawing, consider using a gridding system. Gridding uses graphs to either enlarge or reduce an object by drawing each grid, one at a time, rather than the entire object.

Use various types of erasers, always making sure they're clean. For example, a kneaded eraser is often used by pencil artists because it's easy to stretch it into various shapes for different effects for erasing. Lightly pencil in your initial shapes so you'll be able to erase those first marks as you refine your drawing. Mechanical pencils are cleaner and easier to erase than graphite pencils.

Often you hear people say that they can't draw a straight line. However, with training and persistence anyone can improve his drawing skills. Although some people have an innate ability to draw, others can learn. Many people believe it's hard to draw something that's unfamiliar. However, the opposite is true because the mind gets lazy with familiar objects, drawing what it thinks is there rather than what is actually there.