Learing All About Digital Sketching Techniques!

How do you make sure you are drawing correctly? By practicing these proper sketching techniques and sketching tips, you will help build fundamental eye-hand coordination skills to be a successful artist!

If you're doing it on the computer already, then just shake out your hands, relax, and start up another digital canvas to experiment on. What you will be doing first is learning how to draw random shapes.

From this exercise, you will learn how to use the digital brush tool, in your program of choice with the options available, to simulate those important sketching techniques needed for digital drawings!

Otherwise, grab a piece of paper and let's get started!

1. Loosening up!

Through personal experience, I've had students, when asked to draw a straight line, do it with meticulous care. I could see their hands stiff up as they try to get it as straight as possible.

What were the results? Not a straight line at all! It was bending in various directs up close. Not only that, some students go back and forth, creating a straight line that it looks jagged and fury.

When you do a straight line, you do it fast! It's the same with any other shape. Thus, on your digital canvas, I want you to do various circles and lines fairly quickly and all in one stroke.

The faster you do these shapes, the more continuity the shapes will have. As well, you will start to develop a sense of control. Where does this control come from?

The answer is practice!

2. Categorizing your brush strokes

On this section, take your digital tool off from the drawing surface for a little bit. Relax. Now, I want you to do the motion of the shapes in the air just to get a feel for the shape without the friction of the drawing surface.

You will use your imagination as to how those lines will look like as you pretend to draw. While continuing with the motion, slowly drop the digital tool down on the drawing surface.

How does that compare to the shapes that you've drawn previously? You will find that it becomes just slightly smoother.

Through a lot of practice you will discover another important point. At first, you will move you hands through your wrist. Slowly, but surely, your wrists begin to tighten the faster your hands move.

Eventually, you will find out that your whole arm begins to move! That's where control comes from. And what do you get? You get the first type of brush strokes: the angled strokes!

So what happens when you repeat it the angled strokes on the other side? The result is that you will get crosshatching! This is very useful for creating form!

Lastly, when you are just focusing on tiny areas, then you will get pointilzation. This is a result of using just the hands and wrist for these types of brush strokes!

Note the type of textures you can get with each technique!

In conclusion: when you switch between the movements between the arm and the hand, you will develop these three types of sketching techniques (angled, crosshatching, and pointilzation)!

3. Learn those sketching techniques!

Once you learn how to control those rough sketching techniques with the use of your hand and your arm, the next thing is to learn what strokes are needed for digital art and drawing in general.

You will need to learn the short strokes first. On your digital canvas, do a series of short strokes that are quick and straight. Do several of them. Then, alternate the direction. There are four fundamental directions that you should focus on: horizontal, vertical, slant, and the reverse slant.

After you have done some practice lessons, you need to do the exact same directions over again. This time though, you want to curve those short strokes in the four mentioned fundamental directions.

And when you're done that, put those short strokes together to see how those directions interact with each other. Doing those directions will develop your hand and wrist movements to match specific textures.

Of course, once you're done with the short strokes, repeat the entire exercise over again with longer strokes to develop the arm movements!

4. The art of blocking

As this site has an emphasis on drawing digitally, you will need to learn a technique called 'blocking.'

That is, these sketching techniques are used to create large forms of shapes quickly. As well, blocking allows you to create quick gradients and values.

In order to do that, you will learn how to use the opacity, brush size settings, and other options to create those varying widths. These can be created by the pressure sensitivity options of your digital drawing instrument.

With just one type of brush, the chalk brush, you can block in an entire composition just by altering the size and the pressure sensitivity options!

See if you can use the sketching techniques and the brush strokes to start blocking in your own digital paintings!

I hope you enjoyed this lesson. As always, have fun with these simple learning activities and spend some time on practicing these concepts. Remember to stay motivated!

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