How to Make a Sketchy Drawing From a Photo
Learning to draw what you see is one of the most basic and important skills you can have as an artist, whether your subjects are live models or still-life scenery. If you live in a cramped art studio or another crowded environment, it can be hard to find a quiet place to sit outside and draw without distraction. Learning to make a sketch replica of a photograph exercises your hand-eye coordination as well as the right side of your brain, which is responsible for recognizing spatial relationships; in this case, the ability to draw exactly what you see without assigning a meaning to it.
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Instructions
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Place your materials on your desk, with the photograph you want to sketch within easy viewing range and well-lit. You don't want to risk eyestrain.
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Grip the pencil loosely between your thumb and index finger, supporting it with the middle finger.
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Locate the dominant element of the photograph and begin sketching it lightly. The dominant element of the photo is located in the foreground and will likely take up the majority of the image.
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Work inward from the edges of the photo until you have blocked out the photograph as a collection of geometric shapes.
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Fill in the details. Try to not think of objects in the picture as as reflection of reality, but rather as a series of lines and curves. This prevents your brain from tricking you about the appearance of the object because of its own preconceptions of what the image should look like instead of what your eyes register.
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Continue sketching lightly until you finish the photograph down to the last detail. Do not erase any lines you've made.
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Go back over the lines you want to keep as part of the drawing to make them slightly darker, but leave the other lines present.
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Draw with crosshatching -- a series of criss-crossing lines -- as a shading technique. Densely grouped lines indicate darker shading and sparsely grouped lines indicate lighter shading.
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Tips & Warnings
Although you can turn photographs upside down to make their shapes unrecognizable to the brain and make drawing easier, this is likely an impractical practice method unless you want to impersonate Spider-Man when doing live model drawing.
References
- Photo Credit Jupiterimages/Photos.com/Getty Images
