Sketching Techniques

The Beginner's Guide to Sketching offers lots of inspiration and advice for anyone looking to take their first creative steps or wanting to add a new piece to their design portfolio. The comprehensive guide covers everything from choosing the right drawing tools to understanding shading and value, adding color, and creating a finished scene.

If you're a complete novice, you should have a look at our seven fundamental pencil drawing techniques. But if you're ready to go, here some of the artists that contributed to the Beginner's Guide to Sketching offer some expert advice to get you off to a flying start

Avoid smudging

""There's nothing more frustrating than trying to make a clean-looking drawing that loses its brilliance and value thanks to smudging. Instead, use smudging to your advantage every now and then to smooth out shading. You can do this with several tools. I use a simple piece of tissue paper to get the job done.""

How to create curly hair with simple lines

Want to draw curly hair? Illustrator Eva Widermann suggests these sketching tips: ""Draw two straight vertical lines; these will be your guidelines for the width and length of the curl. Now loosely draw a wavy line down between the two lines.

Keep some texture

keeping some texture. ""Some artists might find using watercolor crayons a little on the grainy side; however I like the added life the grain gives to a sketch. You don't have to add water over the whole image. Leave some areas untouched to add a bit of texture to your sketch.""

How to sketch sky

Sometimes it's preferable for your shading to be less sketchy and more smooth and subtle. Pencil lines don't blend perfectly unless you're very careful. We don't want a sky full of scribbles, unless it's on purpose!

Instead, use spare paper to doodle a big swatch of soft graphite or charcoal pencil, then use a large blending stick to pick up the soft dust to use for your image. Keep using the blending stick and adding more scribbles as you need more graphite. Using the same technique, start darkening some areas of the sky to define the tops of the clouds.

Silhouettes

""Have you ever noticed that every important character in an animation movie is recognisable from their shadow alone? This magic has a name: the silhouette. The purpose of finding a strong and interesting silhouette is to create an easily recognisable character that will remain clear in the visual memory of the viewer