Pencil Sketch of a Dwarf

Hello, over the last couple of months I have been blogging about several landscape pencil drawings I have finished and a high-level overview of how I completed them. I do a lot of landscape because I just love to draw them. Another reason that I like to draw landscapes is that they are actually very easy to do and make a great starting point for practicing and gaining confidence.

This week I want to go a little different direction with my blog and talk about accuracy in drawing. I bring this up because there is another area of drawing that I would love to be able to do well and that is portrait drawing. However, to be good at portraits you must be able to draw accurately. Actually, it is more than that, you have to be able to accurately see, interpret what you see, and then correctly render that on paper. I have heard many artists say that portrait drawing is the hardest subject to master, and I would have to agree with them. Nevertheless, I also believe it to be one of the most rewarding forms of art.

Old landscape pencil drawing that was done around 2009
Now my problem in drawing is that I am not very accurate in my drawing skills. I can get away with that in landscapes because accuracy is not as critical. Of course, I have to worry about perspective and a few angles here or there in a landscape drawing. Although if I am off a little on the direction a tree branch, the tree will still look like a tree. Again, if I am off on the angle of a mountain slope, the mountain will still look like a mountain. However, when drawing a portrait, if you are off even just a little it will be noticed.

The reason I bring this up, is that I am going to start to include portrait drawings in my blog as well as the landscape drawings. My goal will be to increase my accuracy. Back in July I blogged about the two drawings I did of my dogs Lucy and Anna. As I described the process I used for creating the drawings, I said that I transferred the rough outline using home made graph paper. That is one way to ensure the drawing starts off with the correct proportions.

Many professions today use tools to help them achieve very accurate drawings, this is not cheating. If you want to test that theory, try drawing a portrait by first tracing an outline. From there try and finish it, making it as life like as possible. My guess is that you will learn that even with a very accurate starting point, drawing a life like portrait is still very challenging. However, that is where the real artist comes out. It is not the starting point or method, but the finished work that is important. The finished impression is the true art, not the methods to achieve the work.

Now, with that said, as an artist I would still like to be able to achieve a certain level of accuracy in my drawing without the use of aids. I am sure there are artist out there that can do this instinctively, but I am not one of them. This really jumped out at me with the drawing I am including in this blog post. The drawing is one I did while out camping in July of a dwarf leaning on a carved harp. Taking the drawing by itself, it is not awful as a quick sketch. When placed against the reference there are many areas that the drawing is completely off. Now, I am not going to post the original drawing for a side-by-side comparison because I do not own the rights to do so. Anyway, the drawing is off and that is what I want to correct in my skill level.  To do so, I need to learn the skill the old fashion way, through practice and hard work. As I finish up the summer and move into the fall, I am going to research different ways to practice accuracy without using special tools and post my results. I will let you know what works for me and what does not. Now, this will be my personal opinion and others may find different methods that work for them that I found did not work for me. Everyone is different in how they will approach drawing. I just hope sharing what I learn may help others.  I will also be providing links and credit to the individuals that I get the techniques from. In other words, I am not out to reinvent the wheel but to learn from artists that have come before.

I hope everyone has a good week. Please leave any comments below, especially if you have ideas or techniques that you have used to gain accuracy in your own draws.

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