Hey, fellow art enthusiasts! Like most beginners, I initially viewed erasers solely as tools designed for making corrections. Recently, I’ve been studying how artists employ subtractive drawing techniques, aiming to use erasers more deliberately in their art process. In this post, I’ll share what I’ve learned about subtractive drawing, why it matters, and how you …
Techniques
Hey fellow art enthusiasts! As you’re probably aware, figuring out where the vanishing point goes is crucial for drawing perspective, and messing up this simple step can make the whole drawing seem odd. So in this post, I break down what exactly a vanishing point is, how to locate it when drawing perspective, and some …
Hey art friends! Over the past couple of years, I’ve been on a journey to revive my drawing skills as a beginner. Specifically, I have been reading art books, watching tutorials by experienced artists, and practicing fundamentals to improve my drawing skills. So, in this post, I am excited to share the 10 most essential …
Hey art pals! If you’ve been learning how to draw for a while, you’ve probably heard about value studies, also known as tonal drawings. They’re super helpful in expanding your value range and drawing with more depth and are widely considered necessary practice for anyone hoping to master drawing or painting. Personally, doing value studies …
Hey, fellow art enthusiasts! As you probably know, pushing the darks in your pencil shading can help improve the depth and realism of your drawing. But that’s something that I have struggled with a lot in the past (and occasionally still do). For the past couple of years, I have been training myself to draw …
Hey, fellow art enthusiasts! If you’re anything like me, you love to indulge in drawing on toned papers occasionally. I particularly enjoy doing value studies on toned papers because it allows you to focus on the structure, shadows and the highlights in a drawing while the paper takes care of those tricky mid tones for …
Shading, in my humble opinion, is the most satisfying part of the drawing process. It’s where the real magic happens as you render your basic outlines into a drawing brimming with a sense of depth, volume, and form. When I got back into drawing last year, I must admit that my shading skills were seriously …
I first stumbled upon the idea of negative space in drawing while reading “Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain” by Betty Edwards a long time ago. It opened up a new way of analyzing shapes, edges, and space for me. Ever since, I’ve been curious to learn how I could use negative space …
Hey there, fellow art enthusiast! Shading is by far my favorite part of drawing. There’s something almost magical about watching your drawing outline transform into a three-dimensional masterpiece when you render some shading to it. Now, I must admit that when I picked up drawing again last year, my drawings looked rather flat. But I’ve …
Hey there, fellow artists! As you probably already know, blending can be a great tool to make your drawings look more interesting and polished by smoothing out the transition of values in a more gradual and subtle way. In this post, I’ll be diving into five of my favorite blending techniques that you can use …
Let’s face it; I’m not exactly going to be the next Michelangelo. But as a beginner artist, I was determined to figure out how to make my drawings look more realistic. Spoiler alert: it was a lot trickier than I initially thought. Early in my art journey, I realized there was a lot more to …
One of the problems I faced when learning to draw portraits as a beginner was that my drawings looked flat. To compensate for my lack of understanding of what is required to add depth to my drawing, I tried a bunch of different shading techniques, but I was unable to suggest the shapes of the …
As someone used to monochrome drawing, I got interested in learning the Trois Crayons technique this month to introduce myself to the world of color drawing. In this post, I give a basic overview of the method and share the five tips I found helpful in drawing with the Trois Crayons technique. An Overview of …
Artists use different hatching techniques to suggest form, values, motion, and texture in their drawings. And besides being an efficient and attractive way to render a drawing, hatching techniques are especially useful to show gradual tonal shifts on mediums that are not conducive to blending, such as pen and ink. In this post, I explore …