Hello! Cutie, I am Comic black rainbow.
After you read the previous article: “What's the basic drawing skills？Can you teach yourself the basic skills of drawing?”
I believe you already have some knowledge of the 4 basic drawing skills you need to learn to draw!
So let's talk about how to learn and practice these 4 basic drawing skills, to help us in any stage of drawing.
Let us break through barriers and improve our skills, take our painting to the next level!
Further reading you might find interesting:
What are the basic drawing skills? After learning the 4 skills, you can become a drawing master!
Painting barriers? Why do you fail to draw after learning the basic drawing skills?
Learn and practice drawing material
When some people first learn some drawing media, whether it is hand-painted tools, such as oil painting, watercolor, etc. Or digital painting software, such as Photoshop, sai, etc. They may find instructional videos from youtube or buy reference books to learn, these are good learning methods. Sometimes after reading the knowledgeable information, we will have a great understanding of the tools we use. When we are unfamiliar at the beginning, follow the tutorial videos or the steps in the book, we will feel that using tools is not that difficult, so the learning of tools is actually easy, but how to be proficient? There is no shortcut, it is to "commonly use". Just like a language, some people can understand English but can't speak it. What is the interesting situation? It’s because we don’t speak it often. We don’t use this language, but we receive this language for a long time, so the part of our brain that receives information is trained, but the part that outputs information from the brain to the mouth is not trained. It will cause the situation that you have learned a language, but you don’t know how to speak. Everything is the same. You only receive information in one direction without using this skill, you won’t be able to develop this skill. So if you want to be more proficient in painting tools, the only way is to do more and use them frequently!
Learn and practice contour
First of all, it is recommended that you first look for the subject you like, such as the human body. You can find some websites that have human photos or sketches of the human body. For animals, it depends on whether you like to draw dogs or cats. Look for more related reference photos. If you want to strengthen the painting skills of this subject, you can even find the related anatomy to understand its structure, and study the structure for the subject. It will help you when drawing this subject and master the body more quickly. Finally, if you want to enhance the softness and authenticity of the figure, you add the concept of perspective to paint, which will make your figure more vivid!
Learn and practice light and shade
The learning of light and shadow requires you to observe the different details of light and shadow for a long time. Through observation, it is also a kind of learning. Through the changes and the atmosphere that the light and shadow illuminating in different materials, you can try to draw the scene on paper. The color learning suggestion is to learn from other people’s works first, because sometimes real photos or the colors in the scenery may make us painting too saturated or dark. The scenes in life are not necessarily so beautiful. If there is no aesthetic basis for color matching, we may not be able to beautify our paintings by directly extracting colors from real life. So we can look at the color matching in the works of other masters first, and learn how to apply it to real-life reference paintings. If you don’t understand what I mean, let me give you the simplest example. You can download some camera apps, try to use different filters to take pictures of real-life scenery, and then look at how do different filters make color change in real life? Sometimes just a little change of color can make the real picture to be the heaven, so learning the use of colors through these references and tools can also greatly help you practice basic color skills!
Learn and practice perspective and composition
The study of perspective is knowledge. You can learn one, two, and three-point perspective at the beginning. After you learn these three basic concepts, try to use these perspective concepts to draw more complicated pictures. Until you are familiar with it, you can learn to analyze some more complex perspectives, such as upward and downward perspective. After you learn this, you can play with fish-eye perspective, distortion, exaggeration, and more complex perspective. The composition is recommended to start the basic plane composition to understand the geometry, direction, size... and other elements, what will be the impact on the picture, and then play with advanced three-dimensional perspective composition.
After reading how to learn and practice the above basic skills,
Where do you want to start learning and practicing?
If you are a beginner in drawing,
I would suggest that you can start with the contour draft first,
Then play with light, shadow, and color,
Finally, learn perspective composition.
If you are someone who already has the drawing experience,
I would suggest you practice directly from the weaknesses you want to improve.
This will relieve you of the pain that you are not being able to paint!
I am very happy that you finish reading this article. I believe that if you want to read this article, you must hope that you can make some progress or a sense of accomplishment in drawing. The above basic skills are the foundations that all kinds of styles of painters cannot easily escape from learning. Nowadays, drawing does not necessarily have to be proficient in all basic skills. You can also become a leader in a certain field of painting style. But if you don’t want your own drawing to be limited to only one level or state, you have to learn those basic drawing skills. If you have stronger basic drawing skills, it can help your painting and the speed of creation in the future! If you have any questions about learning the basic drawing skills, please leave a comment below or use social media or mail to share with me! I will do my best to answer your questions!
