Improve Your Drawing Skills

Hatching and cross-hatching

The precise shading that hatching techniques produce are often used in pen/ink drawings like political cartoons and strip comics.

Hatching is the drawing of many parallel lines close together, while cross-hatching is overlaying one set of parallel hatching with a set in the opposite direction.

Choose a subject with plenty of shadow and practice these techniques by drawing only the dark areas using hatching lines of various distances about for light to medium shadows, and cross hatching for the very dark areas. Try to avoid drawing an outline so that you have to rely on translating the shadows that you see into a two-dimensional reproduction.

Shading

Pencil shading is more commonly used than hatching because far more tones can be produced by varying the softness and pressure of the pencil and the number of layers of shading. It is less precise than hatching and can be modified and manipulated more easily, and errors are easier to hide or erase.

Practice shading by choosing a subject with plenty of curves, and light it strongly from one side.

Negative space

Another useful perspective to practice is viewing and capturing a subject purely in terms of the background space around it.

Choose a subject such as a piece of furniture and place it against a contrasting wall. Block in the shapes of the wall where the items is "not".

Different angles and perspectives

We can get too set in drawing a subject from the same angle. For example, choosing a cup to practice an elliptical shape and curved shading. How about turning the cup on its side or upside down?

Choose a view of an object that is not usual so that you're drawing less from your brain's set knowledge and understanding of that item and forcing yourself to study and draw what you see.

There are so many different materials (new and old) for drawing with, that it is worth reviewing some of these. You may find something here you hadn't thought of trying.

Pencil

Although we usually abandon crayons at some stage during our childhoods, the humble pencil remains a close friend for many of us.

It's worth experimenting with pencils of various hardness to find the type that suits you best. You will probably find that you keep two or more levels of softer pencils and a harder one for lighter and finer work. The US and European rating system for hardness of a pencil is different. The European system uses "H" to denote "harder pencils, rated from 9H (very hard) to H, and "B" to indicate blacker or softer pencils - rated from 9B (softest) to B, with the HB combination being the standard, everyday pencil. The US system uses "#1" for the equivalent of a "B", and "#2" for "HB".

The softer the pencil the easier it is to shade with, but it also produces a coarser application and bluntens more quickly than the harder pencils. To compensate, I recommend working on a finer grained paper, the softer the pencil you want to use. But you can also make a feature of a bold drawing on textured paper, and a very soft pencil is ideal for this.

Soft graphite pencils (9B) feel very solid and bold and are great for big expressive drawings and sketches. The downside (and occasional upside) is that they reveal every flaw in the grain of your paper and appear very coarse when used together with finer pencils.

Charcoal

Charcoal can be very messy to use, and art suppliers have compensated by offering charcoal pencils. Like graphite pencils, these are made of a thin rod of charcoal encased in wood or plastic to protect your fingers from the charcoal dust.

However, many artists enjoy the process of drawing with a stick of charcoal as many different marks can be achieved by using the whole area of the stick. Blackened fingers are simply part of the fun.

Charcoal drawings need to be sprayed with a fixing substance to prevent smudging. While these can be bought from art stores, its often simplest to use ordinary hairspray.

Conté

Conté sticks are a charcoal and wax compound which makes them easier to use and slightly more resistant to breakage than pure charcoal. Conté drawings also require a fixative to prevent smudging.

Pastel

Pastel is available in a few formats: soft, hard, water-soluble, oil, and pastel-lead pencils. The wide range of colours available make this an enjoyable medium to draw with. For best results use a paper or board with some "tooth" to it to capture the particles and give your artwork depth. Soft pastels do smudge easily and require fixing. Water-soluble pastel drawings can be manipulated with a damp brush to blend colours, while oil pastel drawings can be blended using a solvent or linseed oil. You can also produce some interesting effects by overpainting oil pastel in acrylic paints to fill in blank areas of paper with colour, while the pastel areas shrug off the paint.

Coloured pencils

The coloured pencil medium is becoming increasingly popular due to its versatility and precision. Artists are able to obtain photorealistic drawings due to the huge range of colours and by layering colours. See Painting Light With Colored Pencil by Cecile Baird, below.

Pen

Drawing with pen can be an excellent way to learn to control your technique, as the marks you put down can't be erased. Pen can't achieve the close shading marks that pencil does, so light and shadow representation becomes a precise study of shape and the creation of texture using hatching techniques.

Any type of pen can be used for drawing, but felt tipped and fineliners are the most popular with artists, followed by fountain pens and even old fashioned quills for the fun of it. Ball point works well for redefining animation lines after the colours have been inked or painted in.

Soft pens or brush pens

Brush pens have a flexible tip - sometimes found as a double-ended pen with a hard fibre-tipped pen on one end for outlining, and the brush tip, for shading, on the other. These pens are ideal for the vibrant art of hand-drawn graphic novels, as they offer solid colour in a set palette. Precise shading of colours can be built up by layering.

Chisel-tipped pens

Remember how much fun it was to colour in with highlighter pens? The range of colours available now in chisel-tipped marker pens makes these a useful addition to an artist's toolkit. The chisel point allows for some interesting marks and these pens are fun to experiment with. Chunkier marker pens are great for big, bold drawings.

Some brands also make refills, making replacement of individual colours cheaper.

While the quick drying nature of these pens usually means some inevitable hard edges and overlapped colour, solvent can be used to wet the area and blend the colour more easily. Some brands include blending solvent in their art marker pen sets.

Brush and ink or paint

A brush can also be used to draw with. Before pencils, and even drawing with charcoal became popular, artists would sketch their subject matter with a brush and paint to make a basic plan of positioning and pose.

You might also try using a brush and a water colour wash to fill in some shading areas in a pencil sketch.

Artists using brush or pen for drawings can also make use of splatter techniques to add interesting texture and depth to an ink drawing.

Although to a lesser degree than with pencil and pastels, the tooth of the paper used can also change the effect of the ink drawing, and is worth experimenting with. For heavy fibre-tipped and marker pen use, you may want to use bleed-proof paper which has a coating on the underside to prevent the ink bleeding through the paper.

Do you remember joking around as a child, pretending to draw on the walls with a click pen? You thought the nib was safely stowed, but the metal casing marked the wall anyway. Or perhaps you discovered metalpoint drawing by dragging a key along a painted surface. If not, maybe it's time to start playing.

Silver, and other metal wire, was used to draw with in Renaissance times, before the discovery of graphite and the development of the pencil. Leonardo Da Vinci produced some beautiful silverpoint artwork (see the drawing on the right) because his meticulous nature and attention to detail suited the restrictions of the medium.

Requirements for metalpoint drawing

Metalpoint drawings are done on a specific paper or board that has been primed with chalk, clay, gesso, or gouache paint, much like the painted wall of childhood experimentation.

Most metalpoint artists use a length of wire clamped in a pen-shaped vice or a stylus. The point of the wire can be rounded off for a softer impression, and this is easier to work with for beginners - and is erasable if the drawing pressure is not too heavy.

For a finer line, the wire can be shaped with a grinding stone to form a sharp point. This sharpened point usually etches slightly into the paint layer and is not erasable.

Most metal wire can be used for metalpoint drawing. Silver wire produces a silvery grey mark to begin with, but oxidises to a brown colour. Copperpoint becomes greenish, bronze becomes yellowish - so it is worth taking the final colouring into consideration if you are after a specific look. You can hasten the colour change by placing the drawing in the sun.

Metalpoint drawing requires patience but the resultant artwork has a delicacy that is more difficult to achieve with pencil. Tones have to be built up in layers of hatching strokes, and it is not possible to achieve very dark strokes, giving the drawing an ethereal quality. Areas can be softened by careful smudging.

If you enjoy meticulous drawing and are frustrated by the roughness of a pencil drawing and the tooth of general drawing paper, you will appreciate the charms of metalpoint.

Silverpoint drawing of girl by Leonardo Da Vinci. Public domain image.

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