Basic Drawing Skills

People tend to say ‘I can’t draw’ because they really think that it is either something you are born with or not. Although to a certain extent some people might have a greater talent for drawing skills than others, it is also possible for anyone to learn to draw anything to a reasonable standard. There are specific techniques involved in learning to draw and once you know them you can really master the skill of drawing and subsequently this will help your painting.

To start off with in drawing, did you know that virtually everything can be drawn so that it is made up of 3 basic shapes? The 3 shapes are a circle a square and a triangle. Included in these definitions are variations of these shapes – e.g. for a circle, also include and oval and for a square also include a rectangle.

If you create a drawing by starting off with a rough sketch using these shapes then you are starting to draw already! Once you have the rough shapes then firm up the outlines and move on to the details. The figure on the left is by no means perfect but it was created in a matter of seconds using basic shapes and can be fine-tuned with detail once the proportions are right.

Which leads us to the other main thing to take account of when you start to draw is proportion. Don’t start just drawing one part of the picture in minute detail and then go from there. Start with the whole big picture. Use your rough geometric shapes to produce a vague sketch of your object or objects first. Make sure that you spend the first few minutes putting in the major points of the picture (for example if you are drawing a figure do a very rough sketch from head to toe of the whole figure using your basic shapes before you even start to think about any detail). Literally take only a couple of minutes to do your first rough sketch.

Once you have this make sure that you have the proportions right. Measure with your eye the relative sizes of one part of the drawing to the other – is the wine glass half of the size of the bottle that you are drawing?, is the head bigger than the hand? Simply comparing one part of the drawing to the other can make you realise why your picture is not looking right.

So, to start off in drawing, do lots of basic sketches using the circle, square and triangle. Keep practising one minute sketches on very simple objects until you see yourself getting better at it. Drawing only gets better by practice and learning techniques from other that have been practising for years.