Drawing basics

     Hello everyone, my name is Skip and I have a passion for drawing.  I am a self taught artist with years of trial and error under my belt.  Having searched the web for tutorials over the years I have found few that were very helpful.  (One source that has actually been very helpful is a pencil artist in the UK by the name of  Mike Sibley.)  Because of this, and having been asked many times for help from someone about drawing, I have decided to start my own blog to help others learn how to draw.  I want to save others the frustration of drawing (possible for hours upon hours) and ending up with something they are not happy with. I have many, many drawings hanging on a wall that were started and never finished because they didn't turn out how I wanted them to.

     I am going to go about this a little different from everyone else.  Most tutorials online will spend a majority of time teaching you the shape of what you are drawing.  I am not going to teach you how to draw an eye for instance, I will teach you how to make the eye you draw look as realistic as possible.  There are seemingly endless tutorials on how to draw the shape of something so I won't waste your time with more of the same.

     That is not to say that realistic drawings don't start with correct proportions.  In truth, I believe there are three things that are paramount to a great drawing - perspective, tone and texture.  As I said the perspective (proportions) are thoroughly covered and rightly so.  I will say that perspective is so important that you should do anything you can to get that right from the start.  There are many arguments online about how to go about this.  Some saying that if you don't freehand your work than you are cheating.  While I have great respect for people who can do this I do not believe this is a must for your art to be "real" art.  There are several ways to get your initial outline down on paper.  The most common ones are either freehand, using grids or a projector.  Personally I mostly use a projector to get my outline and ensure the correct proportions.

     So enough of that, as you can tell the rest of this blog will be about tone and texture. These will be laid out in short tutorials that hopefully will help you become a much better pencil artist.  As of right now I have no set plans for how to write this so stick around and please either ask questions or offer suggestions to help improve this blog and make it a success for you and other artists like yourself.  I truly want to help and and will offer all I know and have learned freely.  I will not tease you with simple tutorials then offer you the good stuff if you pay me!

Happy drawing,

Skip