Drawing Tips For the Motivated Beginner!

Before we begin any digital painting, there are a few drawing tips that you need to know. It is imperative that you have a good grasp of drawing in general, whether it be real media or digital media.

This section will focus on some key methods to practice drawing so you can build up your foundation. After all, I don't expect you to understand the lessons on this site if you can't go beyond drawing a stick-man!

First thing to do is to get comfortable. Grab a desk, a pencil, and a piece of paper. It doesn't have to be fancy materials. A scrap piece of paper or a simple mechanical pencil is fine. Whatever works for you to make yourself comfortable is best.

The second thing is to get rid of distractions. I don't want you to stop your focus. These lessons will take time to master.

1. Practicing the line

These drawing tips are to help you control your line art form. On the piece of paper, being drawing a straight line. How did it go? Did your hands move a bit slow? Did you have to go back and forth making your line look all fuzzy? Is your line short?

Depending on how you answered those questions, you will need to make some effort on improving drawing the basic line. This is because the line is an important factor in creating shapes, forming shading, and adding depth.

For this first phase, an ideal line should be fairly straight, long, done in one stroke, and has even pressure throughout the entire length.

After that, try altering your line. For example, try bending the lines to form a curve, zig-zag, spirals, and waves.

Work on practicing those properties!

2. Practicing pressure

The drawing tips in this section deal with how well you can control your pressure sensitivity. When you first did your line in step one, how hard did you push? From my own experiences, I found beginners like to push hard on their pencil.

It's not the beginners' fault, though. It came from the need to show clarity when writing that they are used to pushing hard. We want to get away from showing clarity. In drawing, not showing clarity depicts depth.

The farther you are from the object, the fainter the object is. This is true for lines. In this lesson, I want you do draw your line again. This time, go from light pressure sensitivity on one end to hard pressure sensitivity on the other end. Do the reverse.

Make it harder for yourself. Practice going to consecutive sessions of light and hard pressure sensitivity on the same line. Make your lines curve while controlling your hand pressure at the same time.

3. Practicing speed

Speed is very important for any artist. For those aiming to be professional digital illustrators, you need to do things fast because your time during the sketch and idea phase is usually unpaid. You want to minimize this time as much as possible.

Given what you have learned up to this point, you need to combine all the elements in your previous lesson with doing it faster and faster.

Here is your chance to do multiple lines as fast as possible with a fairly good degree of control. By the end of the lesson, your hands should have gotten a very nice workout!

4. Creating a drawing

Everything up to this point is to help you progress in a way that is natural. Once mastered, the drawing tips for this section is to simply draw. There are many ways to draw.

The common method is to draw from reference. In other words, you want to copy or trace the object to get a feel of it. You can start with simple inorganic objects like a cup, a flower vase, or whatever interests you in general.

Only by studying real life object can you really begin building your own imaginative world.

As you draw it as fast as possible, keep in mind its proportions. You want to train your mind to pick up the important parts that make the object what it is rather than worry about the details. It is this type of training that will become useful when you are creating a digital painting from scratch.

If you're having difficulties, try using a grid. Then, outline the general shapes and see how it fills out the grid in proportion to other objects.

Of course, your pressure sensitivity exercise will determine shadows and depth.

See how each of the exercises help? The controlled lines create the shape; the pressure sensitivity helps with depth; the speed will help you focus on multiple experimentation sessions.

Please remind yourself that these drawing tips are an ongoing learning process. You can never have enough practice. If you feel that you are adequate with these drawing tips, you can now freely transfer these skills to create beautiful digital paintings!

All that is left is to follow along with the lessons on this site carefully and bring out the digital art master in you!

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