⇒ How To Draw A Hawk ⇐

No matter what medium or technique you use to depict your subject, always try to use a full range of values. Value is the lightness or darkness of a color. You can simplify value by thinking light, medium and dark. A good drawing should have all three. A tool I use frequently in drawing and painting is a value scale. You could easily make up your own any number of ways. The first one I made out of a page from a Pantone color formula guide mounted on a piece of foam core. The second one, The Don Rankin Value and View Finder, is available through Cheap Joes' Art Stuff. I like this one because there are holes in the card where the values are and you can hold it right over the area you're evaluating to get a really good match.

"Value drawings are one of the artist's best friends." ~ Harley Brown

"Learning to draw, before you paint, is like learning to walk before you run." ~ Don Getz

"No one can walk away from a fine drawing session and feel downcast." ~ Catherine Robertson

"My contribution to the world is my ability to draw... Drawing is still basically the same as it has been since prehistoric times. It brings together man and the world. It lives through magic." ~ Keith Haring

"Drawing used to be a civilized thing to do, like reading and writing. It was taught in elementary schools. It was democratic. It was a boon to happiness." ~ Michael Kimmelman

This photo shows the first two steps in my sketching technique using pencil only.



Here I've added a watercolor wash to the above pencil sketch. This approach really helps prepare me for painting and using color. I feel that value is the most important element that makes up any painting.


"My paintings cannot be a negation of what has always been and always will be necessary - drawing and search for values." ~ Theodore Robinson

"Drawing is not the same as form; it is a way of seeing form." ~ Edgar Degas

"I have learned that what I have not drawn, I have ""never really seen." ~ Frederick Franck

"One must keep right on drawing; draw with your eyes when you cannot draw with a pencil" ~ Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres

Drawing not only develops hand-eye coordination, it teaches one to really observe, to see, as nothing else ever will." ~ Nancy Marculewicz

Drawing is one of the best ways to meditate, while staying connected to the world around us." ~ Elsha Leventis

"Drawing demands that the artist pause, to be." ~ Pat Oblak