As promised in my previous blog post, Do I Have What It Takes To Learn Art?, I will show you how to make your first successful drawing! With simple, easy to follow steps, you will be on your way to creating successful observational drawings and observational art in no time!
But first, an Important note: Pace Yourself
If you’ve completed the drawing, and compare it to a masterpiece, you’re gonna think it sucks, but if you’re able to accept that you can’t beat a master on day 1, you can look at the masterpiece and pay attention to what they did to make their work so much nicer. You might not know the answer right away, but it’ll put you in the right mindset and strategy for rapid improvement.
If you think all your dreams might be crushed by looking at a masterwork and comparing it to yours, instead you can think about how well you can draw compared to yesterday. The answer is probably a little better; and if you keep at it, the answer will be a little better times forever. That’s called perfection. There is no timer, this is not a sprint. It’s a journey, an adventure in discovering what you’re capable of. Take it as fast or slow as you like.
What You’ll Need & Setup for Observational Drawing
sharpened pencil, or mechanical pencil. A pad of paper. Can be any paper, just stack a bunch of papers, with a hard backing so you can hold the pad while you draw. Access to objects of any kind.
To start off, look around your home or environment for objects. Can be anything but better to choose simple things to start.
Examples: coffee mug, stapler, box, fork, candle holder, soap dispenser, apple, vase, whatever. Pick a few things you like.
Lay them out in front of you at about arm’s length. And light them in any way you like that’s pleasing and allows you to see them well.
On a sheet of paper, I want you to practice with your drawing tool, just making a few different kinds of lines.
Practice holding your pencil in the following way and drawing lines. The butt of the pencil in your palm and your thumb, pointer, and middle wrapped around the stem (example below). Keep your wrist straight no matter how you hold the pencil. Notice that when you hold the pencil further back, you have less control, and less pressure. This is good but you might find it uncomfortable at first.
Back to Basic shapes.
A little more warmup and mini tutorial before we begin. I know you’re anxious to make your first drawing but this step will make the result so much better. All those basic shapes that you drew in the last blog post, draw again. Remember to keep your wrist straight, move your arm and elbow instead. If you’re someone who tends towards drawing very small, drawing a bit bigger will make this part easier. Our goal here is to create a faint and loose impression of these shapes. Practice as much as you like. The more, the better. It should look something like this.
When drawing, think of your light lines as the scaffolding- the base structure that allows you to start building the real structure. If you can draw lightly and loosely in the beginning, you can adjust your drawing as you go. When I say light lines, hold the pencil further up to allow for light loose strokes.
Use Your Pencil To Measure
Stand shoulders straight, hold the pencil out in front of you and use the end of the pencil and your thumb to measure your subject or parts of your subject against each other. An example of this can be seen in the next step where I measure my subjects height and width.
How to Draw From Observation
The object(s) you chose for your first observational drawing should stay there with the same lighting until you are finished. You are to keep your head at the same angle and distance from the subject the whole way through. If you move your head a bunch, or move around, you will start to see your subject from different angles and it will make drawing much more difficult. For my subject, I chose a bottle of laundry detergent. Nothing too interesting or complex, but challenging enough for a beginner due to the curves and irregular shapes.
Step 1:
Lightly mark, where on your paper, the subject will sit. Then we compare its height to its width and mark how wide it is on the paper. Use your pencil as a measuring tool to confirm your measurements. The smaller you make it, the harder it will be to draw. It should look something like this.
Many beginners and untrained artists tend to draw off the page because they don’t set the bounds of their drawing within the page before they start. This beginning step helps you avoid that common mistake and ensure that your drawing is always within the bounds of your paper.
Step 2:
Now that we marked the bounds of our drawing on the paper, we can begin wrapping the object. Use only straight lines to draw a border around your object. Remember to measure. Keep them light and as simple as you can make it. This is called the “block-in” It should look like a silhouette of your subject with no lines inside it. If you have
The block-in helps to draw accurately by simplifying everything into basic “blocks”. Drawing is hard, and requires a lot of brain power. We want to minimize this by figuring out all the big general things first. This will allow us to later focus on details without being overwhelmed with everything else. That’s also why we use straight lines at first: To keep things simple.
Step 3:
Now that we have the very basic information down, we can now create blocks inside our silhouette. Using the same technique as in Step 2, we can further break down the shapes that we see in our subject.
We look for these shapes by looking at where the parts of the object meet, and where the shadows form the strongest, thinnest edges. In my image on the left, I’ve outlined these landmarks. Then I simply recorded them with straight lines, as best as I could. Try to do the same thing and find them in your subject. Don’t worry if it’s not absolutely perfect. Try your best to just get the information down and worry about perfection later (or never).
Now that we have all the general information about our subject blocked in, we can focus on refining our initial construction and making it pretty. We don’t need to worry about getting all the proportions right because we already did that and double checked.
Step 4:
Refining our block-in. Now we can take another look at our subject and observe how it probably has some curves in it, as well as way more detail than we blocked in. We can draw the curves we see over our initial lines with slightly thicker bolder lines. In this step, you can hold your pencil as you would a pen for writing. This will give you better control. But still don’t move your wrist. Use your arm and fingers instead.
Try to make single continuous lines to avoid the chicken scratch effect, and stay true to your block-in. Then gently erase the old lines and your result should be a smoother, cleaner version of the block-in you have drawn.
Now we have a drawing. It’s not the masterpiece that will save the world but we’ll get there.
Notice what we’ve been doing so far. We look at the subject and try to capture it as simply as possible. We save all the details for way later as for now we are just trying to get the proportions and angles right. We can add complexity as we go without being bogged down by an overwhelming amount of information. This is how you would draw anything, and if you want to take it further, you can do the same steps further. The more time you spend on your drawing, the more developed it’s going to look. But if you didn’t get the first few steps right, it won’t matter how much detail you add because the base wasn’t right.
Things to Keep In Mind
Try to remember you most likely won’t get a perfect result observational drawing on your first try. Success in observational drawing comes with knowledge and practice. There’s a lot more to know and a lot more to practice.
This is not the only way to draw or even the way that I regularly draw. But I do believe this method is a great way to practice observational and drawing skills. As you progress, you will likely form your own methods and steps, but the idea will be the same – Going from general to specific. Something like a camera coming into focus in super slow motion.
We will later get into the topic of rendering (often called shading), which will elevate your drawings further and give them that 3D look everybody loves. But if you would like to try to render your drawing before then, by all means.
For now, do your thing. Practice the aforementioned steps. Really get the ideas drilled in. When I started learning, I’d draw everything in my apartment, starting from the easier things, all the way up to drawing entire rooms. And it worked because now it’s easy.
Conclusion
And that was observational drawing, or observational art. The more times I say observational drawing, or observational art, the higher my keywords rank on google. That’s why I’m saying observational drawing and observational art so many times. But while observational drawing is a great introductory tool for learning to draw and learning to study the world around us, it’s only one piece of the puzzle. More pieces coming soon! Until next time – Stay tuned, and stay drawing!
