Pencil Drawer by NYCCO Underdesk Drawer 23 Inch Wide - Ball-Bearing Slides - Black by NYCCO

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Take a look at your surroundings. The world is your canvas. Cliched, but it’s true. Take a look around your home or enjoy a walk outside and look around you – there are subjects you can sketch everywhere. Today, for an amateur artist the essential tools are a sketch pad and a couple of pencils. If you want to experiment you can put colour on paper with a variety of premium graphite pencils. However, no need to rush out to buy a complete drawing set as most artists use what is available. Initially graphite was used for preliminary sketch lines for drawings to be completed in other media, but gradually its use increased among painters, miniaturists, architects, and designers. They started to use graphite for studies but, due to its flexibility, it was soon used for more complex artworks.

Handmade Pencil Storage Chest | Holds 250 pencils - STEP BY Handmade Pencil Storage Chest | Holds 250 pencils - STEP BY

You can then smooth these edges out later on, to create a more realistic final image. To get this part right, imagine how the figure would look in 3D and from every angle – like it would in real life. Learning how to draw the objects which surround us is a basic skill for artists. However, for some it is the main medium of their work, the tool to create more than a simple copy of the real world. Related articles: Top 11 most iconic and famous sketches ever made- 20 modern artists you should know- Drawing Room 2020

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More and more drawings are driving us to question the simplicity of this art form and its function of representation. In fact, some talented artists have created – through apparently simple drawings - an illusion of reality which is even more convincing than the real object itself. For a great part of artistic tradition, the imitation of reality served the function of representing religious or mythological subjects, but with the advent in the 19thcentury Realism presented a naturalistic approach to imitation. With oil paints and big stretched canvases, artists started to create artworks which truthfully represented the reality around them. Since the ancient Greek artists ‘Mimesis’, copying reality in such a way that it mimics the real object – creating an extraordinary illusion – has been the aspiration of art. Continuing throughout history, the idea of art as imitation has always remained at the core. When you graduate from small-scale sketches and want to create bigger drawings, gridlines are a lifeline. They can help you figure out where different objects belong, as they appear naturally. “If you have a photo or illustration that’s broken down into quadrants, you can start with one small section and finish that first. Then, you can move onto the next one. Just makes sure you are still connecting it to the previous section, so they still relate to one another.”

Pencil - Kooness Famous Hyper-realist Artists working in Pencil - Kooness

It answers our need to observe, communicate and construct. Even children have an urge to draw. It makes us human. Success was caused by the fact that graphite pencils provided a substantial range of dark and light shading and tonal modelling. Hard graphite pencils are used to produce marked lines of figures and landscape details, while softer and darker graphite pencils offer rich colours and textures to artists - as we can see in the works by Eugène Delacroix and Vincent Van Gogh. It’s good to step outside your comfort zone and try drawing as many subjects, using different drawing styles, as possible. But it’s equally as important to find and focus on sketching what you love. When you’re learning the basics, it can be tempting to skip to the more advanced stuff. But it’s important to nail the fundamentals first and master a skill first, before moving onto something more complicated. For instance, as you fill your sketchbook and are experimenting with colours, start with a limited colour palette. This will help you figure out how colours work together and won’t distract you with all the possibilities out there.The great masters of pencil drawing always kept the elements of lucid contoursand limited shading. They were able to create a strong effect with only a few lines – like in the works of Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres and Picasso. Really pay attention to how they’re drawn. You’re drawing from someone else’s sketch, focus on how they build their lines. If creating from real life, pay close attention to the object and the space around them.”