Drawing: a review of how to get started and how to improve

Drawing can be seen as putting lines, shapes, values, and textures on a surface. Learning to draw as a skill is like learning to write and most of us remember that becoming a struggle, although cursive is an extinct skill in many schools today. There are numerous terms related to the graphic process of drawing – squiggles, sketches, squiggles, etc., but this article will focus on the act of drawing as a process for translating a three-dimensional object (s) or scenery with marking tools. This process is basic to most forms of art and design. Look around. Every man-made object started out as a drawing on a surface. Sketched as an idea, then drawn more precisely to better convey the vision, then perhaps on a drawing board or in a computer-aided design (CAD) process for further refinements.

But let’s talk about drawing not only as an art form, something unheard of not many years ago, but as a way of seeing. As beautifully as Cézanne, Ingres or David could draw, during their lifetime, drawing was considered a preliminary basis for a portrait, a still life, or a landscape painting. Today, his drawings can be considered on their own as beautiful works of art. His process of analyzing form and translating it into shapes, lines, values, and textures on paper with pencils, charcoal, chalk, and ink, with astonishing insight, leaves us remarkable works to see and study. From time to time, his drawings turned out, by today’s standards, stronger works of art than the resulting paintings.

Drawing is a process and should be approached as such. I would recommend that you never set out to “draw a picture.” Use the drawing to analyze what you see. Get control of your medium (graphite, charcoal, etc.) and use large paper. Draw using large muscle control before attempting to use fine motor skills. That will come. Don’t worry about the details. That will come. Putting precise details into a drawing that has poor shape, no understanding of spatial relationships or negative space, and little understanding of composition, is like decorating a cake made of adobe. Observe your subject (let’s say it’s a life class with a nude model) and start drawing with circular or elliptical strokes, quickly capturing the torso, hips, upper and lower legs, arms, head, moving the hand almost constantly from the starting part. This is a gesture drawing. Capture the position and relationship of basic shapes very quickly. You should have a loose pattern of “hand-drawn” circles and ellipses all over your body in just one minute, no more. Gesture drawing forces you to focus on basic shapes and their relationship to each other. This is the basis for understanding shape and its position in space. In undergraduate school, our drawing teacher had us fill 18 “x 24” notepads — both sides of the paper — and use 8-10 pads in a 12-week class. We used willow and vine charcoal for these exercises and understood the human form in space. Do this and you will too.

Then apply this approach to drawing landscapes, animals, and still lifes. Even portraits. We have a tendency to want to draw an “image” with precise details. If you work toward that goal and are willing to work diligently with this and other exercises, you will be able to make a “picture” that has meaning, that is truthful, that is accurate.

Draw. Draw as much and as often as you can. Approach it as a way of seeing and understanding. An excellent book with an attached workbook is that of Betty Edward Draw on the right side of the brain. Read it to understand it, then do the exercises. You will be able to draw (or draw better) in eight weeks or less. You can find it on Amazon, or better yet, in quality art supply stores where you can select from a wide range of drawing supplies, pads, and papers.