Claudia Myatt answers ten commonly asked questions by people who want to learn how to draw.

Many people think that drawing is a skill you are born with rather than one you learn. It’s true that a few seem to have a natural ability with a pencil, but this is rare and most of us, me included, had to find out how, one line at a time. Good drawing underpins a painting; even abstract artists need a thorough grasp of shapes and proportions.

If your drawing skills are wobbly, they can be improved with a little understanding and a great deal of pleasurable practice. Here are ten common drawing problems and how to overcome them.

Q1. How do I learn to draw things from life rather than from a photograph?

A. Draw through a window

Look at the view through a window frame in the same way as you would work from a photograph.

The big challenge facing you when you draw from life is turning a three-dimensional scene into two dimensions.

Put the photos away and take out the sketchbook – but don’t panic, you can stay indoors and look out of a window, or through a door.

Choose a scene with interesting overlapping shapes. The window helps you turn three dimensions into two as it echoes your page and acts as a viewfinder.

Draw a frame on the page the same shape as the window then draw on the page as if you were drawing straight onto the glass; one line at a time. Notice where each line meets the edge of the window and how it relates to another.

The wonder of drawing is that you are the magician; if your lines are in the right place, the eyes looking at the drawing will translate them into three dimensions again. If they’re not in the right place, this magic won’t happen, which is why drawing in perspective is so frustrating.

When you go outdoors to sketch, take a viewfinder with you and use that to help you frame and select your scene. You can buy viewfinders from an art shop, but they’re easy to make out of stiff paper.

Q2. My drawings look very childish, how can I improve my skills?

A. Draw for at least five minutes every day

Think of learning to draw as you learnt to write – it takes constant repetition and practice to refine your style.

You have some catching up to do. As children we draw without inhibition then, as teenagers, drawing usually gets side-lined in favour of words, which become all-important.

We learn to read at the same time as we learn to write so these skills progress together, but drawing is different. We learn to ‘read’ images from the time we are shown our first picture books, but at no time are we taught to ‘write’ images, or draw, in the same way that we are taught to write words. The result is that our ability to ‘read’ a drawing far outstrips our ability to ‘write’ one – it’s like being able to read War and Peace but unable to write more than your name. The gap is wide and embarrassing, as your critical faculty far outstrips your ability to do it.

Keep at it, a little every day, and bring yourself up-to-date. The good news is that your sketchbooks can stay private; nobody but you will see your efforts.

If you become despondent, just remember how much effort and careful repetition it took to learn to write.

Q3. Drawing perspective on buildings is complicated, how do I get perspective right?

A. Buy an angle finder

A good high street stationery shop will stock a folding ruler. Here’s one way of using it.

When you draw something in perspective, you’ll find that vertical lines stay put; it’s everything else that shifts around in a confusing way.

Line up one half of an angle finder with an upright – say the edge of a building – and move the other half until it lines up with the tricky edge. It can help to shut one eye. Transfer this directly to your page and it will be correct.

What you’ve done is used the evidence of your eyes to shut your interfering brain up, as it’s the job of the brain to interpret odd edges and angles to make sense of your world.

‘It’s the edge of a house, it’s parallel to the ground, ’your brain will insist, peering around corners. ‘Not from where I’m looking,’ is your eyes’ reply, ‘and I have the evidence to prove it.’ There’s much more to perspective than this, but if you remember to trust your eyes not your brain, you’ll overcome the trickiest bits.

Forget what shape you know an object to be, but ask yourself: what shape is it from where I’m standing?

For a comprehensive guide to mastering perspective order a copy of Drawing Perspective by Tim Fisher by

CLICKING HERE

Q4. How do I get the proportions of my drawing right?

A. Measure and compare

 

Learn to measure accurately. How high is your object compared to how wide?

The most important question you need to ask about any object is: how high is this compared to how wide? If you get this right, everything else will follow, but if it’s wrong, it will only get worse.

Don’t leave it to chance; take the trouble to ensure it is correct and, after a while, it will come instinctively.

Why do we find it so difficult? The way our heads move is partly to blame. When looking at a scene, we turn our heads side to side, but not up and down, so our viewpoint is wider than it is high. Our drawing paper is a rectangle, however, and we try to squish our wide scene into a narrow box. The results are disappointing: dumpy boats and buildings; wide landscapes compressed into a rectangle; and a sliver of water on a distant lake becomes a big blob.

Learn to rely on measurement, not your brain.

The solution is simple: look at what you want to draw, extend your arm and shut one eye. Choose what seems to be the shortest edge and measure with your thumb how far down your pencil it comes. Now keep your thumb there and turn your pencil to the widest part. How many times does that short edge fit into the longer edge? If it’s the same size, your drawing will fit into a square. Keep making comparisons all over your drawing, as many as you need. How large is that foreground tree compared to the distant mountain? How high does it extend?

There is also a tendency to draw larger the things that interest you most, or that appear to be more important. This process of ‘question and compare’ also helps you notice how much smaller further away objects are than nearer ones. Our tricky brains will tell us that two objects are the same size, but your eyes will see that one is half the size of the other because it’s a little further away.

Treating everything as a series of connected shapes and lines will help you to produce a cohesive drawing where everything is related, rather than a disconnected collection of objects that are not in proportion to one another. Try it and don’t be embarrassed if people look at you. You’re an artist; it’s what artists do.

Q5. I have to rub out so many wrong lines, how can I stop my drawings ending up a mess?

A. Put the eraser away

Draw lightly with a soft pencil. Keep going over the lines until they appear right.

You draw a line. It looks wrong so you rub it out. You draw another line and that’s also wrong so you rub that out, and your page looks such a mess you give up. Does that sound familiar? Try another way: Begin drawing with light lines, using a soft (B or 2B) pencil. Feel your way into the drawing.

If it helps, put reference points or construction lines in to help you find the shapes; some people find it useful to draw a series of shapes, such as a square or triangle that they know fits the proportions.

If you draw a wrong line, leave it there; you’ll know where not to draw next time. Keep going until the shape comes into focus then strengthen the lines you want to keep.

If the drawing still looks too messy, rub out the wrong bits, using a sharpened eraser. I have a fine-pointed refillable pencil eraser, which is great for detail. You may find that you don’t need to rub out, however, as your eye will focus on the stronger lines and ignore the weak ones.

As you continue to progress, begin using a sketching pen.

When you feel a bit more confident, try drawing with a sketching pen. Feel your way in with a light touch, then strengthen the lines that you’re sure of. If you end up with a mess, never mind, it will be a useful mess.

Q6. I want to draw outdoors, but don't have the confidence. How do I overcome this?

A. Do it anyway, but keep it simple

You may be nervous drawing in public, but do it anyway.

You know you ought to, and you want to, but it never quite works out. You take your sketchbook, make a few marks then get disappointed.

There’s the embarrassment of strangers peering over your shoulder and saying: ‘Do you mind if I look?’ without waiting for a reply – and somebody always does.

Sketching from life, however, is one of the most useful exercises you can do. It will help you to improve as an artist as well as being deeply satisfying, whether you deem your sketches ‘good’ or not. So, here are some tactics to help remove all those obstacles:

1. Start by drawing away from the public: from the car, with your back to the wall, in your garden or a friend’s garden, or in the kitchen.
2. Draw anything, at any time; don’t wait for a ‘pretty’ scene to appear.
3. Keep your sketching kit simple. You are less likely to be noticed in a public place if you use a small sketchbook with a few pens or pencils. You can add colour later from memory if it’s too awkward using paints in a busy spot.
4. Write in your sketchbook as well as draw. Words and pictures complement each other well and treating your sketchbook as a diary is a good way to take the pressure off and enjoy the moment. If a stranger sees you writing, they will give you privacy, whereas an artist is seen as public property.
5. By all means, take photos to use for reference later, but think of the camera as an additional tool, not something you do instead of sketching on the spot. Even if you only manage a few lines, it will all help.

This sketch shows my main sketching kit but all you need to get started is a sketchbook, pencil and pen.

Q7. How do I know where to start drawing a complicated scene?

Trying to add too much detail is a common problem so make life easier with a choice of two approaches:

A1. Use a viewfinder to select a suitable view

A basic viewfinder is invaluable when sketching out in the landscape.

If you try to compress what you think you see into the proportions of a standard piece of paper, everything will be distorted.

Using a viewfinder as your window on the world will make you realise how much you have to crop out to fit onto the page, and moving it around the scene will help you compose a sketch with interesting shapes.

If there’s a complex object in the scene that you are worried about drawing, choose a view that cuts out the hard bit. The human brain understands the language of cropped pictures and supplies the missing areas from imagination.

A2. Start in the middle

Here is the result of a stroll around Bryher on the Isles of Scilly one windy afternoon.

Another approach is to start with whatever has caught your attention and work out from there, one line at a time then stop when you’ve had enough. If it helps, choose a theme for the day (the week, or the month) – doorways, signposts, people, flowers, beach finds, whatever sparks your enthusiasm or suits the location – and focus on that with lots of small cameo sketches. This is also a good way to take a fresh view of a familiar location.

A combination of the two approaches can add great variety to a sketchbook so, rather than page after page of similar looking landscapes, you have a combination of distant and close-up observations that reflect your personal experiences.

Q8. How do I get my tones to look right when drawing?

A. Don’t use tone as an afterthought

With a loosely sketched sky, it’s hard to read the focus of the lefthand sketch, but get your tones right and you’re half-way there. On the right you can see that the subject is brought forward by the dark, neat sky behind.

Adding tone – shades of light and dark– to a drawing creates the illusion of three dimensions. You don’t always need to use it as sometimes shape can be enough to enable you to read a scene, but if you choose to use tone, use it properly, with the same degree of care as you’ve given to the lines, and not as a way to coverup mistakes.

Make sure your shades of grey are clear and positive; if you’re shading up to the edge of a shape, take the time to keep the shape clean and clear, don’t obscure the lines so that the story you’re telling becomes unclear.

Even quick tonal sketches need clear edges.

Practise with different softness of pencils, working from full black to white – you have the full range of tones at your command.

Q9. I can't draw people, so how do I add them to my sketches?

A. Add them in the distance

At a distance, a person is a blob – or rather a dot and a blob, like this.

Sooner or later, unless you live on a desert island, you will have to include people in your sketches. The trick with anything you’re not confident with drawing is to put them in the distance; on a small scale everything is a small, simple shape. As your confidence builds, bring them nearer.

This has two advantages. First, you don’t have to do faces, which take more practice, and secondly, you can draw someone without them noticing. This works well in a café; start with the head and shoulders, draw a bit of the back of the chair then stop. Gradually put more in as you gain experience.

When the time comes to draw people in more detail, make it easy on yourself and do the back view, head and shoulders only, like this.

You’ll find plenty enough to challenge you in the back view– different hairstyles, the backs of men’s ears, collars and scarves. You could fill a sketchbook with these alone. Soon you’ll be ready to turn the person around, one step at a time and try a three-quarter view then a profile followed by a full face.

Turn your figures around, but focus on the overall shape. Be careful not to make the size of the head too big; it’s smaller than you think.

Q10. How much drawing should I do before I start painting?

A. As much or as little as you want

A sunset scene with little detail may not need to be drawn first...

It depends on whether you are drawing a simple scene that will need a few lines and plenty of tone and colour, or a complex subject that needs careful lines. A sunset scene, for example, will need little or no drawing (above), but this close up of boats on a beach (below) is all about shapes, and I needed the colours to flow to clean edges rather than blend.

… but a detailed scene of boats needs structure before you add the colour.

Don’t worry about whether your lines will show through on a finished watercolour. They usually blend nicely into the overall painting, or if they worry you, a little gentle rubbing out after you’ve finished will take care of any stray lines.

You can, of course, do no drawing at all – try going straight in with the brush. It’s risky, but liberating and it makes you concentrate on the flow of shapes rather than become overwhelmed in detail. At the other end of the scale, you can create a careful drawing then gently tint it with colour so that the lines show through clearly – or just add colour to the part that matters most.

The finished boat sketch with added colour.

Above all, slow down and spend time looking, really looking, at the shapes and tones you are seeing. The more you look, the more you will see and appreciate even the everyday subjects all around you. Enjoy it!

Claudia Myatt

Find out more about Claudia and her work by visiting www.claudiamyatt.co.uk