How to make an accurate (detailed) drawing

Having familiarized yourself with the various materials for drawing and seeing the variety of effects that can be achieved with their help, you should then learn how to use them so that the picture reproduces the object of your choice with the required degree of accuracy and looks “like real”. Accurate drawing should not be confused with detailed drawing: several lines can provide greater similarity to a face, figure or landscape than any number of precise details. It depends mainly on an understanding of form, proportion and relative scale. All this requires first of all close observation and constant verification.

Learning to draw is similar to learning to write - the basic skill must be mastered before you make it work for yourself. With the first mistakes, you can turn away from drawing and decide that you simply don’t have a “gift”, but you can minimize these failures by following a simple strategy, at least at an early stage.

Drawing visible scales

Most artists use different measurement systems when drawing, the easiest way to do this is if you draw the size that you see. The term “on a visible scale” explains itself, and many people naturally draw just that. Others act differently: they try to draw as close to real size as possible and must force themselves to reduce their drawings.

You can easily check the size by eye by placing an object, such as a mug, on the table and lifting an album in front of it - from this position you will draw. Then close one eye and make two marks on the paper, one on each side of the circle. If you are in the open air and paint a landscape or city scene, you can make a series of such marks at the top of the sheet of paper. This can be done either by lifting the pencil to the level of your drawing and moving your thumb up and down, or using the ruler and reading its readings.

This may seem like a mechanical way of drawing, but it helps a lot when precision is required. If you are making a preliminary sketch for a picture, and not just drawing for the sake of the drawing itself, accuracy is more important than expressiveness, and you will not have to make corrections while working with paints.

Measurement by comparison

You can check it as before, but this time first bring the album as close as possible to the mug, and then move a meter away from it: the mug will become very small in relation to a piece of paper. Such small sizes can make work difficult; for example, if you draw a person from nature, the model may be at some distance from you, and if you want to make a bold drawing with coal, then this approach will entail a lot of unnecessary restrictions. In such cases, measurement systems can still be used, but one “key size” should be selected and the rest of the work should be adjusted to fit it. When depicting a figure, the head is considered the unit of measurement - we will talk about the proportions of the human body later - but in any figure, any basic detail will help you determine other sizes. In the image of the interior, for example, it can be a table or some other piece of furniture that plays a significant role in the composition. If at first you make a light sketch, you can determine the dimensions of the remaining parts, for example, the height and width of the window in the background, again with a raised pencil. To get started, experiment again with a mug on the table: measure the height and compare it with the width. If you draw in another way, you should periodically check the size by stretching your hand with a pencil forward: it is enough for you to bend your hand slightly or move - and the sizes change.

DRAWING OF DRAWINGS

Drawing includes, among other aspects, the definition of form by fixing the outlines of the subject. This implies a kind of falsity, since no object is flat and in nature there are no real shapes. And yet we have to come up with outlines because they create form.

Abris

It’s nice to feel the shapes, creating a simple still life of several objects - mugs, plates and bottles — and approach them in terms of two-dimensional shapes, outlining only their outline. In this way, a good drawing cannot be made, because although it may be accurate from the point of view of the outline, you will not comprehend the shape of the subject, and besides, it will not seem tangible. Nevertheless, this is a useful exercise, because it makes you carefully look at the outline and analyze it.

Comparisons

Drawing outlines will become much easier when you start comparing one shape with another and checking the relative sizes, as explained on previous pages. See, for example, how the outlines relate to each other. If you arrange them so that they overlap each other, how and at what point will this happen? Ask yourself how much larger, higher or wider one shape is than the other, and in the case of a tall object - with a bottle - what is the ratio of its width to height? Common mistake: deal with each part of the drawing separately. An apple of perfect shape lying on a too small relatively

Negatives

Another useful way to check the accuracy of a picture is to look at the shape between the objects and behind them. This is called a negative outline, or negative space. If you are drawing a mug with a pen, forget about the pen and try to evaluate the shape of the space between it and the edge of the mug. It is sometimes useful to draw these outlines before you make a positive drawing; sometimes you don’t have to draw real objects at all. Drawing negative outlines is another exercise that teachers often give. Although it seems a little far-fetched, it makes one sharpen one’s watchfulness. In addition, it gives pleasure, because it allows you to look at things in a completely different way and thus abandon prejudice. When your drawing becomes more confident, you can continue to use the system of checks and comparisons. Negative forms are very useful for drawing a figure in those cases when something went wrong, and you do not know what exactly the error is. You will have to fight for a long time over a standing figure to depict difficult forms of limbs that you could not correctly correlate with the body. Often it is possible to detect an error by checking the shape of the space between the arms and the body.

DRAWING FORM

So far, we have considered measurement and verification systems to provide clear outlines, contours, and proportions, but in fact we need more than that. Drawing is the creation of illusions: you depict a three-dimensional world in two dimensions, and a good drawing should give a convincing impression of the three-dimensional shape of the object and its outlines.

Definition of light and shadow

Unfortunately, no measurement system can help you reproduce the hardness of an object. Here you must rely on direct observation, but it is not so simple. The shape is represented by the light falling on the object, which creates light and dark areas, and their shape depends on the nature of the object. it’s relatively easy to evaluate these differences in tone (light or dark), but almost all the objects and objects that you want to draw — whether it’s a face or an apple on a plate — have their own color. This is confusing because our eyes notice color rather than tone, which makes it difficult to place light and dark areas. It makes sense to squint, which makes the color unclear, most of the details will take on relief, and you will see tones more clearly.

Shape and shape

Outlines can be completely useless when reproducing a form, because rigid contours flatten it. The shape of a round or cylindrical object, such as an apple or a mug, indicates the boundaries beyond which the object is hidden from your sight. If you strengthen this part of the subject more than the one closer to you, the illusion of hardness will collapse.

A good way to practice drawing a shape is to use the tone from the very beginning, avoiding outlines as much as possible, or sketching out just a barely visible outline. Try to work with a wide tool, such as the side of charcoal, or try the method for detecting bright spots. Using coal is not necessary at all. The shape can be flawlessly depicted with a pencil or even with pen and ink, but coal will allow you to avoid a linear approach.

LINE DRAWING

We just explained how to build a shape using tone. You will probably find it contradictory if we say that it is possible to create the impression of volume by means of lines alone. It all depends on the quality of the lines and how you will vary them in the picture. The line can be solid and dark, light and thin, or soft and barely noticeable.

Lost and Found Borders

As we have seen, by drawing solid outlines around something, you destroy the unity of the object, because in reality it does not have solid outlines. Some borders can be identified by the line of the cast shadow, but others will be very soft and sometimes hardly distinguishable. These “lost and gained boundaries” are a very important concept in drawing, because they determine the volume. You can see this effect even on the simplest subject. More complex objects - flowers or a human face - are many hard and soft borders defined by various characteristics of forms, as well as how they turn away from the light. Closely following the differences in the quality of the line, you can transfer the shape in the drawing without using feathering. Although it is rather difficult, it makes sense to make such an attempt, since the result can be very expressive.

Outlines

There is another way to use the line to represent the shape. Outlines are the same as outlines. These are the lines that follow the outline. You can give an obvious example: a border framing a porcelain product; less obvious contours are created by the clothes: the folds of the sleeves convey the shape of the arm under them, the crosshairs of the laces in the boots outline the rise. And in fact, clothing often helps to depict the features of the human figure: the line on the belt conveys the bend of the body, the cuff on the sleeve or the watch strap emphasizes the shape of the wrist. Of course, not all objects have such convenient “keys” to form (an apple is quite difficult to draw in outline). But if such opportunities exist, try to use them in your picture, and it does not matter if you draw only using lines or use a tone.