Notes on Drawing

For a little more than a year now I've been drawing sketches on a regular basis. Typically I use a mechanical pencil; a trad pencil for rough outlines and shading; and lately, different sizes of sakura pigment liners, to practice drawing in a permanent medium. I've also been experimenting less frequently with copic markers and watercolor.

Over the past year I've learned some principles that are worth sharing with anyone else who wants to get into sketching, but doesn't know where to start. But a disclaimer: it takes far longer than a year to become a truly great artist. It's quite possible that some of this advice is wrong or misses the broader or finer points.

Most of this advice I assume to be a general rule, so I speak in the second person without making many qualifications (e.g. "most people", "some people", "probably", ...). But it's possible these rules don't apply to your own way of doing things.

And please, remember to read this in a condescending voice with a little bit of uptalk, or its intended effect will be lost.

Exaggerate Imbalance

Part of drawing involves aligning things with each other. With practice, alignment becomes instinctive. This instinct makes it harder to draw things that are actually meant to be skewed / unbalanced.

When things in a drawing are too aligned, the figure loses its dynamism, becoming stiff, resembling certain kinds of folk art.

For example, if you're trying to draw someone's head tilted at an angle, your instincts may cause you to draw it at a much slighter angle than intended, or no angle at all. The best way to experience this instinct is through figure drawing, which involves drawing people in unusual positions.

Alignment is something I still struggle with, and the remedy appears to be exaggeration, where you basically overcorrect.

Levels of Detail

When drawing from a reference photo (or from real life) there are an infinite number of details to capture. The human face is a good example of this: our skin is covered in blemishes and wrinkles down to a microscopic level. Attempting to draw all the wrinkles in someone's face, or even the most prominent ones, is likely to make your drawing look comically old.

It's difficult to reproduce all the details you see, but you normally shouldn't do that anyway. One way to think of art is that it lies about phenomena (what we see) to depict truths about noumena (things existing independently of perception).

So when you draw, you can only draw down to a certain level of detail. You need to choose which details matter most. Typically this comes from their size: it's important that your drawing have a nose, while reproducing individual hairs matters less. But the choice of details also comes from your own drawing style, as well as what you think is personally important in depicting the subject.

You can capture more details with a variety of pen sizes. Pigment liners are useful for this: you can draw someone's more prominent features with a 0.03mm pen, and then use a 0.003mm pen for finer things like wrinkles. If you study the work of mangakas like Q Hayashida, you'll notice this technique.

Shirt Collars

If you want to draw people, and especially faces (which I have tacitly assumed) you'll come to appreciate just how ubiquitous the shirt collar is... unless you stick exclusively to nudes.

Cloth

Cloth can look impressive when drawn correctly, and it's easy to assume the artist copied the folds precisely as he saw them. In practice this is incredibly difficult, and my suspicion is that most artists only capture the sense of what the folds look like. Indeed, it's more effective to capture the sense of things than create a one-to-one reproduction of what you see. I keep repeating this point because it's the most important thing I've learned as a beginner.

So if you want to practice sketching cloth, note how the fabric flows, and the density and direction of folds, and draw based on that.

Hands

Hands are notoriously difficult. Many tutorials exist for drawing hands, and you should consult them.

But remember what I had to say about levels of detail. Hands are really detailed and you may find that usually, you won't even need to draw the individual fingers.

Another useful trick: get the position of the hands down before you draw the arm. Normally it matters more where exactly the hand is than where the arm is.

Method

Find a bunch of pictures that you like, save them, and organize them. Practice drawing them. It's often easier to draw what you find attractive or interesting, than to draw a boring subject which is merely useful for the sake of practice. Avoid the overly quantitative mindset of counting how frequently you practice, how well your studies turn out, etc., because as with anything else, this will foster a hatred of practicing. Still, you'll need to draw things that push your current abilities, if you wish to improve.

I found it beneficial to begin with figure drawing. Countless tutorials are available online and in print, which will teach you things that are beyond the scope of this blog post.

Feel free to experiment; don't worry too much about the details of your methodology; and don't feel like you need to drop a bunch of money on expensive equipment.

Personal Goals

  1. Get better at drawing from imagination
  2. Get better at color, light and shadow
  3. Move beyond sketches to manga style and more conceptual stuff
  4. Develop a stronger personal aesthetic / formula.

Reflection on Hobbies

My hobby used to be writing software, and then it shifted to writing short stories, and now it's drawing. Given this, I may abandon drawing in a year or so and pursue another futile pastime like music.

But compared to software, drawings are more tangible, and there's no pretense of practicality or problem-solving. With software you have to lie to yourself that your project is useful and totally not a naïve waste of time which will inevitably fall victim to bitrot. But with drawings, you draw for the joy of it, and end up with a physical, self-sufficient thing which will endure for years without maintenance. Everyone admires art, but nobody admires code aside from software developers, whose navel-gazing knows no end.