In my previous article I talked about the advantages of buying cheap student grade oil pastels for a sketch medium. You can kit up with a large set and a big sketchbook for only a few dollars, probably under $10 even if you go to a physical store. Now that you skipped a fast food lunch to take up this new hobby, what do you do next? There are several ways to learn to sketch. The basic process is to draw what you see, exactly as you see it. Practice will make you fast and accurate in sketching. So the natural way to begin practicing is to start with the easiest things there are to draw -- unmoving inanimate objects that aren't too complicated.
Pick up some pebbles. They make good still life objects. Put one or two of them out on a flat surface with an artificial light off to the side. This will create a setup that won't change -- you can work on it at night and the light won't change. Until you learn how to sketch fast, using daylight will mean the shapes of shadows gradually change and can become unrecognizable causing bad distortions.
One sketch method is to look at your objects and reduce them to simple geometric shapes -- circles, rectangles, trapezoids, triangles and ellipses. That construction method is very popular because it's fast and if you get the structural lines right, the object will have its right proportions. So try that method with a variety of different single objects.
Just sketch it as a shape and simplify it to overlapping circles, rectangles and tubes. Judge each sketch by whether you got the proportions of length to width right, or the shape roughly right. Don't bother shading it yet. When something like a can is a cylinder, there is an ellipse at the bottom and another at the top. Soup cans are a very good drawing exercise, so are children's blocks and multi-sided dice.
If you lay out multi sided "dungeon dice" you will notice that some faces are shaded and others are bright. Try sketching the shape of each die and then shade in the shadow areas solid, leaving the highlighted areas white. Put in a darker background around the whole thing. If you got the proportions right you will have a very three dimensional rendering of an object that is close to the shape of a book, a ball, a pyramid -- and getting the shadows right will give it depth.
On any cubic object, getting the angles of the sides right is what makes it look solid or not. Decide where the horizon is and pick one spot on it to be the Vanishing Point. Use a ruler to draw the square or rectangle face. Then mark guidelines from the front corners to the Vanishing Point at angles.
Then darken the lines where they go to the back edge of the object. Do a horizontal line across and a vertical line down the sides that are visible and shade in the shadow side or sides. Presto, you now have a plausible cubic object! Make sure the Vanishing Point is centered on the cubic object for maximum accuracy.
Two point perspective means picking two points on the Horizon Line. Make the top angle that would have been plain horizontal angle off to the one opposite its corner. You can draw guidelines to both. The term "Horizon Line" really refers to "Eye height in looking at the picture." This is why you can place it and the vanishing points wherever you want. They may not even be on the page.
Changes in horizon line and vanishing points create different perspectives and angles. If you put the vanishing points close together the object seems to rush at you in exaggerated perspective. Place them farther apart and it seems a bit more natural. Comic book drawing takes advantage of extreme foreshortening to make the scene more punchy.
When you have gotten used to shading geometric forms, start looking at real but irregular shapes. Sketch the outline as accurately as you can, using construction lines in pencil and going over them stronger with oil pastels so you can tell the difference. Try to match both the hue (color) of each area you're drawing as close as possible. You can mix colors to get intermediate colors.
Hold up the sticks in front of the real object to see the true color. The mind perceives yellow-in-shadow as bright yellow, but it's really a muddy brown or greenish brown that can be quite dark. So don't be fooled. You can get better results matching how light or dark it is (Value) and not worrying as much about true color.
Draw the shapes of shadows as their own outlines. Then scribble them filled in. Try to work loosely when sketching anything.
The more often you sketch, the better you'll get at accurate drawing. The more often you sketch the same object, the easier it is to see and correct your mistakes. It can be frustrating at first but eventually you will reach a point where you can ust pick up a pencil or oil pastel and draw anything that's sitting still right in front of you.
That includes good landscapes, sleeping cats, flowers, and anything from a photo reference.
Start with a self portrait in front of a mirror for learning face proportions and doing people. You are the one person patient enough to hold still long enough to be drawn whenever you feel like it. Do more than one self portrait. Don't worry if they come out making you look ugly -- with more practice, you will look better in the drawings than even in real life because real life is more detailed and a lot of flaws in faces are very small subtle things and textures. Leave out any pimples or whatnot, the idea is for this to be fun.
Draw the hair as a single mass of color with some highlights as a solid thing. This looks more real than just drawing lines for hair.
To get face proportions accurately, measure them against one chosen feature. The shape of an eye is a good standard for measuring how far all other features are from each other. Use a ruler to lay across the mirror and measure the width of your eye, then place it and measure the distance to the corner of your other eye. Put those on a line. Measure up from the middle of the eye line to the top of your head. Measure down to where your lips meet and draw a line the width of your mouth horizontal. Measure down from that to the edge of your chin. Measure the space to the hair from the outside corner of the eye and then the width of the hair mass at that point.
This measuring process works better from a photo than a mirror, but with practice you can eyeball it looking at a mirror. Try from a copied photo for exact measurements and you'll be surprised at how good the likeness is.
To make yourself look good, place a strong artificial light above and to one side so that the shadows on your face are dramatic. This is flattering to anyone, the reason driver's license photos look lousy is the light is from directly ahead and flattens out your nose.
If you draw the shadows under the nose it'll show the nose. A common mistake in drawing is to make the shadows on the sides of the nose and on the nose too dark -- if you are just using stark black and white, skip those light shadows. If you're using color or grays, then use the right value (light or dark) for the light shadows on the face and only leave the strongest highlights white.
Another good sketch exercise is gesture drawing. Look at something like a cat, your face, your hand, anything. Try to draw it in under three minutes or two or five. Set a very short time for the drawing and try to block in the most important things about it first without worrying about details.
Gesture drawing is good for something you can do on work breaks, doodling with a ballpoint or anything you have at hand. Doing it often and not worrying about whether it comes out well will eventually lead to gesture sketches that capture difficult poses or ephemeral poses from moving people. The more practice you get, the better you'll get at sketching anything.
Using color for your sketching can make it more fun. Blue and brown are good monochrome colors if you just want to use one stick but get bored with black or graphite. Full color sketching can lead to experience in color mixing. Color theory is its own subject, but you can have fun mixing different oil pastels and trying out combinations.
An essay on Leonardo da Vinci's drawings suggested that to become a good artist, you should get a large sketchbook and use it up in only one month. I have yet to do that, but one of these months I'll start a fresh one and try to finish it in one month. Even at my present level of skill, I would lay odds that the month after I do that I'll be a lot better artist than when I started.
The more you draw, the more your drawings will look good and the more fun it'll be to draw. Talent is just really enjoying the process and having fun with it so that you can put up with the learning curve until you're good enough that your pictures usually please you. The happy thing is that once you start getting anywhere with it, you'll get plenty of social approval.
One fun way to do oil pastel sketching is to use watercolor paper or canva-paper. Do your first sketch and just lightly scribble any shading. Then wet a brush with turpentine or linseed oil and swish it around in the shadows. You'll get a beautiful thinned wash effect lighter than the heavy drawing but darker than white, good for a midtone. On canvas pads you can also use the brush to melt all the color and give it a painted look.
Canvas pads and canvas boards are very good for wet sketching. Some brands of oil pastels are watersoluble, like Cretacolor Aqua Stic for artist grade or Portfolio Watersoluble Oil Pastels in cheaper student grade. They have the advantage that you don't need to use oil based thinners and so are a little easier to use if you don't have good ventilation for the wash stage.
You can also dissolve color by dragging a wet brush over a scribbled palette or the end of a stick, then sketch with a brush. This can create lovely little paintings that look like classic Asian art if you keep them simple. Read a good book on Sumi-E, Japanese ink painting, if you want to learn some brush strokes that are good for sketching something fast and well.
You can also put one color down heavy on the paper, then cover it with another color and scratch lines into it with any sharp object for sketching. This can create white or bright lines on a dark background and is a gorgeous way to sketch. Oil pastels are versatile and cheap, so try anything you can think of in your sketchbook.
Then get some good supplies and working from your previous sketches, try a larger, more serious painting on artist grade surfaces with artist grade oil pastels. The practice of drawing or painting the subject more than once or even lots of times will help make your serious painting come out a lot better.
Enjoy!
