Art

Published on September 3rd, 2012 | by Spyros Thalassinos

4

Get Started with Pencil Drawing Basics

Have you ever been in front of an empty paper, holding a pencil in your hand and thinking: “I can’t draw…”

Well you probably have! And don’t feel guilty about it. It’s the majority of people who think that way.

But let me ask you something. Can you perform a surgery? Fly a helicopter? Scuba Dive? Identify an Accipiter striatus?

Well, if you have trained and practice doing it you probably can. If not isn’t it obvious that you won’t be able to do it?

Same is with drawing. Drawing is a skill too, and as every skill it can be acquired through extensive practice and guidance. There are no short-cuts in doing something well.

Talent do exist of course, but think of it more as a head start. Imagine two people going to university to study nuclear physics, one of them has to work to support himself, the other has all the money in the world and don’t have to. Well in the end they’ll be both nuclear physicists. It’s just that one has to try harder. And my two cents is that in the end of line, the best one will be the one who tried harder.

So the question is not if you can draw. The question is are you willing to learn?

If you are,  I’d like to share with you a selection of good and cheap books to get you started.

And by the way If you don’t have drawing supplies don’t go crazy buying everything you come across in the art supply store.

A pencil and paper is all you need!

Ok, then! Let’s get started with our books selection, hand picked and ordered in a mini-course form to get you started!

Drawing for the Absolute Beginner: A Clear & Easy Guide to Successful Drawing

This inspiring book makes drawing in a realistic style easier than you may think and more fun than you ever imagined!

Authors Mark and Mary Willenbrink (Watercolor for the Absolute Beginner) cover it all—from choosing materials and the correct way to hold your pencil, to expert advice on the tricky stuff, like getting proportions and perspective right, drawing reflections, and designing strong compositions. (It’s not as scary as it sounds…not with Mark and Mary as your guide!)

At the heart of this book, a series of fun, hands-on exercises help you practice and perfect your strokes—24 mini-demos lead up to 9 full step-by-step demos. Each exercise builds on the previous one as you develop your skills, build your confidence, and enjoy yourself along the way. The lessons you learn by drawing simple subjects such as coffee mugs, clouds and trees will help you take on progressively more challenging matter like animals, still lifes, landscapes and portraits…the kinds of subjects and scenes you’ve always dreamt of drawing.

This book is just the ticket for budding artists of any age. It’s never too early and never too late to discover the pure joy of drawing!

Pencil Drawing Techniques

Here is a really good book for the artist who wants to develop his or her pencil drawing abilities, whether it’s to improve your preliminary sketch work, or to create beautiful pencil drawings complete in their own right. Pencil Drawing Techniques brings together six of today’s best artists, all of whom are incredibly fine instructors as well.

The artists show you how to develop your skill and ability in handling pencil technique. Ferdinand Petrie shows you how to handle pencils and produce a controlled variety of lines, values, and textures. Then he shows you exactly how to use these techniques to draw landscapes in a range of styles and compositions.

Rudy De Reyna explains pencil basics, and explores perspective, size relationships, form, and structure. Douglas grave teaches you how to begin drawing portraits by building a drawing step-by-step. Norman Dams and Joe Singer demonstrate how you can use the pencil to produce spectacular drawings of animals. John Blockley and Richard Bolton show you how pencil drawings can capture the essence of a subject and help you work out a plan for painting it. Finally, Bet Borgeson teaches you all the secrets of colored pencil work and demonstrates a whole new dimension.

The book is divided into seven sections: how to handle a pencil, fundamentals of drawing, drawing landscapes, drawing portraits, drawing animals, drawing for watercolors, and handling color pencils. The copious illustrations show in detail how the artists use their techniques. For the artist who uses the pencil, Pencil Drawing Techniques is an an excellent instructional book of ideas for using the pencil creatively.

Keys to Drawing

In this book, Bert Dodson shares his complete drawing system—fifty-five “keys” that you can use to render any subject with confidence, even if you’re a beginner.

These keys, along with dozens of practice exercises, will help you draw like an artist in no time.

You’ll learn how to:

• Restore, focus, map, and intensify
• Free your hand action, then learn to control it
• Convey the illusions of light, depth, and texture
• Stimulate your imagination through “creative play”

Drawing Realistic Textures in Pencil

You won’t believe the incredible drawings you can create using common pencils and the special techniques illustrated in this book. These methods are so easy that anyone—from doodler to advanced artist—can master them in minutes! Step by step, you’ll learn how to capture the look of metal, glass, weathered wood, skin, hair and other textures. Two detailed start-to-finish demonstrations show you how to use these textures to create drawings that look so real they seem to leap right off the page.

The Big Book of Realistic Drawing Secrets: Easy Techniques for drawing people, animals, flowers and nature

If you’re not getting the kind of true-to-life results you want in your drawings (or if you can’t even draw a straight line), Carrie and Rick Parks can help. As award-winning teachers, they have a proven game plan for helping artists of all levels overcome common problems and see immediate improvement in their work. As professional composite artists, they know the tricks and tools for achieving incredibly lifelike results. In this friendly, foolproof guide to drawing, they share it all:

• Easy-to-master techniques for achieving a convincing sense of depth
• How to draw challenging textures like metal and fur
• Putting personality into your portraits
• 40+ step-by-step demonstrations featuring a variety of people, animals and nature

Easy enough so that beginners can jump right in, and comprehensive enough to help more accomplished artists refine their skills. This book covers all the essentials, teaching you the secrets of realistic drawing one step at a time, building the skills you need to tackle any subject convincingly–even those you’ve always thought were beyond your reach. Before you know it, you’ll be turning out picturesque landscapes, stellar portraits–any subject that inspires you to put pencil to paper!

Pencil Drawing: Project Book for Beginners

The age-old art of drawing is one of the most important foundations of all the visual arts—and it’s also a relaxing and enjoyable pastime! This book offers a simple, step-by-step approach to learning the fundamentals of sketching—from starting with basic shapes to rendering accurate still lifes, landscapes, animals, and portraits. You will learn techniques used to render various textures, including glass, metal, foliage, and fur. Even if your only experience with a pencil is writing with one, you’re still perfectly capable of executing these easy-to-follow basics. Everyone who wants to practice and perfect their drawing skills will find this project book created by Walter Foster Publishing and Reeves to be a valuable tool.

That’s all folks! Hope you will find today’s books and advice useful and start expressing yourself through drawing! It might take you some time to reach Leonardo DaVinci’s sketching skills but you will definitely have fun through your journey!

About the Author

Spyros Thalassinos is a former Developer deeply fallen in love with Graphic arts. He has been freelancing as a professional Designer since 2007. And now is utilizing his past programming expertise, along with web oriented languages and technologies, to develop dynamic and responsive websites and mobile applications for Extend Graphics. When he is not busy designing Logos and Websites or referring to himself in the 3rd person, you can find him reading books and watching video tutorials to expand his knowledge. He is also the founder and editor of Make your ideas art .