How to Draw - Sketching Basics for Complete Beginners

You need less than you think. A pad of sketch paper around 9x12 inches and a boxed graphite set with a spread of pencils, an eraser and a small sharpener will carry you through months of practice.

The cheap student sets are genuinely fine. Nothing about learning to draw depends on expensive supplies, and a $12 kit has the same range of leads as a $60 one. Spend the money later, on paper, once you know what you like.

A gum eraser crumbles as it works, which lifts graphite off the surface instead of grinding it into the paper. It is the one to reach for when you want a passage gone without wrecking the tooth of the sheet.

A kneaded eraser is the more useful of the two. It stretches, so you can pinch it to a point for fine detail or press it flat to lighten a whole area. When it gets grey, fold it over on itself and keep going. It never needs replacing until it stops holding a shape.

The hard plastic eraser in most kits is the one you will use least.

Every graphite pencil is marked with a letter and a number, and the system is simpler than it looks. B is for blackness. The higher the number, the softer the lead and the darker the mark, so an 8B lays down far more graphite than a 2B.

H is for hardness. Higher numbers get harder and lighter. A 6H leaves a pale grey line you can barely see. HB and F sit in the middle and behave roughly like the pencil you write with.

For sketching, a 2B does almost everything. It is soft enough to get real darks and hard enough to hold a point.

This is the habit that separates a sketch from a scribble, and almost nobody is taught it. Instead of trying to place one perfect line, let the pencil travel back and forth over roughly the same path, building the shape out of a loose bundle of strokes.

Keep the pressure light. You are not drawing the edge yet, you are circling around where the edge probably goes. Ten quick passes cost you three seconds and give you ten chances to find the curve.

Once the shape is right, go back and press harder along the edge you actually want. That darker line becomes the drawing.

Leave the light exploratory strokes alone. At full drawing weight they drop away visually and stop reading as part of the image, so erasing them is wasted effort. Half the sketches you admire have those ghost lines still sitting in them.

Draw a circle in one confident stroke, then draw another using the light-pass method, and set them side by side. The sketched one is rounder. It is rounder every single time.

Nothing about that is talent. You gave yourself several attempts at the curve and kept the best of them, instead of betting the whole shape on one movement of your wrist. That is the entire trick, and it scales from a circle up to a portrait.

A circle is flat. A circle with shadow on one side is a sphere. That is the whole difference between a two-dimensional drawing and one with depth.

Before you shade anything, sketch a small sun and an arrow at the edge of the page so you cannot forget which way the light runs. Then darken the far side of the form, lightly at first, building up in passes the same way you built the outline. Add a cast shadow on the surface underneath, falling away from the light.

Ask the same question at the start of every drawing you ever make: where is the light coming from?

A sphere has one curved surface, so the shading is one smooth gradient. A cube has flat planes that each catch a different amount of light, which makes it a harder and more useful exercise. Sketch it loosely, place your light, then decide which face is lit, which is in half-light and which is dark.

A cylinder sits between the two. Curved around, flat on the ends.

Then start drawing the objects around your house. Mugs, lamps, door handles, the corner of a room. Almost everything you will ever draw reduces to a sphere, a cube or a cylinder wearing a disguise.