Sketch Art

Sketch art, as some of you may know, is a pretty big hobby of mine, and since a friend has asked me about techniques, I thought I'd share a few here. I'm not a great artist and don't pretend to be, so this advice is really just about the more straightforward concepts.





Right, so we start off with structuring - this is possibly the most important part of the sketch, since without an outline, your sketch won't look like whomever you're drawing. I'll post a focused set of drawings indicating structure in a while, but in the meantime, if you compare them side by side, my character's head is a little bit wider than the original's. This gives my sketch a broader face, which means that the features are spread wider apart (note the distance between the eye and nose). Poor placement has potential to completely mess up a picture, so be careful with where you place your features - the nose is particularly annoying because there's no good measure of where it is in relation with the rest of the face.

In this picture, the nose is the right length, but separated from the right eye by too far a distance, giving our Spartan queen a much broader face than she really has. Another good measure to place the nose is the distance between the eyes and between the eyebrows. The eyebrows maintain the right distance, but the eyes aren't the right distance apart. One way to make sure you have the right structuring is to draw just the outline of the picture, then compare it against the original until you get the exact proportions right.

Right, moving on to shading. Shading is what gives the picture depth, and without it your drawing won't stand out as being any good at all. I generally use two kinds of shading - hatching (using the tip of the pencil) and blending (using the flat end of the pencil, then rubbing it smooth with tissue paper or a finger). Other variants of shading are listed here, and I'm fairly certain that there are more out there.

Here, the majority of the shading is done by blending hatched lines, for example in the forehead. Combining these techniques gives the control of hatching and the convenience of blending, and to further darken the picture I simply added another layer of hatching over the first and blended them together, for example the neck. This allowed me to control the transition from light to dark, and just how bright or dark I wanted my picture to be.

An equally important concept in shading is that of negative space - space that is so light that you don't shade it, but instead the area around it. Note the hair and shoulder on the right side of the picture - instead of shading in the light parts of the hair, I shaded around it. The same applied for the bridge of the nose, the ball of the chin, the shoulder, and the edge of the face further away from the viewer. Filling those spaces in required that I left them alone.






Compare the Batmen. See how much difference a bit of shading makes? Note especially the shoulder and chest on the right. In the first drawing, it looks flat, with little to distinguish what's near from what's far. In the second, the pencil creates two layers - a darker part closer to the viewer, and a lighter part (negative space again) further away.

Shading adds the perception of light and shadow, for example the shadow of the second Batman's head on his chest creates the impression that the light is coming from behind.

Note the hatching above the eyebrows and above the cheeks in both pictures, used to make the face appear closer to the viewer. In the second picture, blending has been added to further distinguish the face from the rest of the head. The blending below the nose, mouth and chin add more layers of depth and shadow to create the illusion of distance, and negative space again applies for the back and sides of the head, the area above the lips, and the shoulder on the right side of the picture.