"" I am by no means a teacher, I have never been to an art school. This is just a way I do my drawing and things that I learn through the years and I hope anything mentioned here could be of any help to any beginner ""
I suggest you draw something easy like a fruit or an animal, human anatomy is by far way more harder why is it? Its because we are use to see faces all day long and the simplest little mistake in a drawing is easy to spot, You can start drawing human being but if you beginning you might be discourage by the results. You could even start by a stone of a tree which give you a lot of freedom for mistakes.
Materials used
Charcoal pencils
General's Hard HB,
General's Medium 2B
General's Soft 6B
General's White pastel pencil
Blender stump
Paper Grey mid-tone Strathmore
What is Great about Mid tone paper is you can work with both highlight and darkness.
First thing to have
Have a reference,
So for today I decided to use a horse.
Learn your subject know the basic shape of your reference.
This is the most important part of the drawing
This is called the foundation or the structure of it a bit like the frame of the house before adding the walls of your frame. If it's not done properly then the end result will look off.
Tips: Learning from your mistake is the most important part of drawing every artist make mistakes and the only difference between a great and beginner artist is the great artist notice more often mistakes and fix it.
Here in my example, I can already tell I did not spend enough time on doing the line structure and it's why I didn't get the best likeness of the subject but it doesn't matter that much as if just a sketch not a drawing of hyper realism which usually used grid method and tracing.
Once you have done your structure lines you can take a little break of a minute or two
to help refresh your brain focusing on something else once you come back to it you will notice some mistakes and fix it.
( it is important to take multiple break during a drawing)
Here i started to add a few light pencil strokes to notice where the shadow area is.
Tip: never put pressure on your pencil to attempts to make it darker use a darker pencil instead
Here I added Highlight with the white pastel and getting ready to blur everything.
Here I started to use a stump to blur the area of shadow to give it a bit of dept and realist.
notice: dry brushes, Cotton swabs works too but they all blend differently.
And then after that I repeated the same previous process, layers after layers adding a few more details each time.
Here I decided to add a bits of white raw strokes in the background to make the sketch stand out a bit more.
Here is my finally sketch
All to say from my point of view is not perfect but you just have to accept it as it is
There a quote saying: Focus on progress , not perfection
And by seeing this sketch I realize that I did progress and suggest you do the same and look at your older drawing and you'll find progression
Thank you if you when thought the whole process and I hope you liked it.
Keep drawing and be creative even if its a little daily what matter is to be constant and enjoy it.
Michael Briere Veillette (Mikrook).