12 Biggest Drawing Mistakes – Video, Part 4

Twelve Biggest Drawing Mistakes Every Fine Artist Must Avoid

12 Biggest Drawing Mistakes Every Fine Artist Must Avoid

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VIDEO – Part 4 (of 4)

Erroneous drawing approach #10:

Relying on tools like rulers, pair of compasses and grey-scale value cards instead of training your hand and developing essential skills of visual judgement.

You might have seen some online video tutorials advocating such tools as grey-scale values. You might also rely on a ruler for drawing long straight lines or compass for drawing circles.

There is nothing wrong in having a grey-scale card in your toolbox, you have to train your eye to distinguish even slight differences between tone values. As a fine artist, you shall develop so necessary skills of visual judgement of tonal values as well as training your hand to draw lines as you intended, rather than relying on helping aids of a ruler or compass and grey-scale values cards.

Here’s one example. As a baby you most likely have been transported in a baby carriage before you have learned walking on your feet. Both methods – walking and riding in a carriage give the same result of getting you from point A to point B. However, your parents wanted you to learn to walk, as relying on your skill of walking would serve you for the rest of your life.

The same goes for drawing. You may use a grey-scale card to judge the tonal values in the beginning. At the same time, practicing your visual judgement is much more important and will help you to perfect your drawing skills.

Also, practicing your hand drawing skill will improve your ability to control the pencil with precision and freedom you want to have.

Using such tools as ruler, compass, and grey-scale values cards is the same for a fine artist as for a walker to walk with help of crutches. You do not want to have “lame” drawing skills.

At the Drawing Art Academy, we want you to have the best drawing skills, and therefore will give you video tutorials on traditional drawing techniques that served many generations of greatest fine artists.

Erroneous drawing approach #11:

Using Five-pencil drawing method instead of relying on one or two pencil grades and trained hand.

Some art teachers promote the 5-pencil drawing method, which is using hard grade pencils for lights and soft grade pencils for shades.

I will explain this erroneous method on the following example. Let say you drive a car and want to go faster. You just simply push harder on the accelerator pedal to do so. You do not stop and change a car engine for one with more horsepower. Vice versa, going slower does not require changing an engine to a weaker one.

Graphite pencils are graded from 9H to 9B going from hard to soft grades. Here’s how it goes: 9H, 8H, and so on, 2H, H, F, HB, B, 2B, and so on, 8B, 9B. There is also the U.S. system that uses numbers only; the approximate correlation between these two systems as follows: #1 is B, #2 is HB, #2½ is F, #3 is H.

Yes, you have to choose the right pencil for the job. Let us say H5 grade is unlikely to provide a deep tonal value no matter how hard you push it. So if you plan your artwork to be in a certain tonal range, you should choose one or maximum two pencils that will deliver the darkest value you need.

Changing multiple pencils with different hardness for varying tonal values is the handicapped approach.

If you want to become a proficient fine artist, you must rely above all on your hand skills to draw the lightest and the darkest values a pencil can provide.

Your talent depends on your skills, not on your tools.

Here’s one story that illustrates this point. One very talented photographer was invited to a dinner and showed his photo works to a hostess. “Oh, you must have a very good camera” she commented. After the dinner he paid back her a compliment. “What a delicious dinner it was, you must have a very good pan.”

So using one or two pencils shall give you brilliant results when you have necessary shading and hatching skills.

Relying on multiple pencil grades would serve you an unwanted favor of being handicapped by tools instead of developing your drawing talents and skills.

In the Drawing Art Academy you will discover how to develop your natural drawing talents.

Erroneous drawing approach #12:

Smudging the graphite pencil for softer effects.

When you see someone smudging a graphite pencil on paper with a finger or stump, you know this person is amateur artist.

The practice of graphite pencil smudging is as inappropriate as going to a very expensive French restaurant, ordering a 5-course meal and asking to blend all five courses together because you are going to eat them all anyway. You just do not do that.

So you don’t do graphite pencil smudging.

I have to say that there are other mediums like charcoal or carbon sticks or pencils, which can be smudged by a stump to achieve smooth gradations of values. However, graphite pencil shade rendering shall be done in strokes and crosshatching without any smudging.

In the Drawing Art Academy, you will discover the correct ways of both methods – smudging the charcoal and carbon pencil as well as rendering shades in graphite pencil in strokes and crosshatching.

Let us recap how you can benefit from the Drawing Art Academy Course:

1. As a student of the Drawing Art Academy you will get video lessons that you can use to improve your drawing skills.

2. Your improved drawing skills will help you to freely express yourself in art.

3. You will discover drawing techniques and approaches that will enable you draw confidently anything you may see or imagine.

4. You will discover how to greatly improve your art by drawing what you know instead of what you see.

5. In the Drawing Art Academy you will get video lessons on human anatomy, knowledge of which is required to draw people and portraits professionally.

6. You will discover necessary information on how to draw in perspective.

7. Video lessons on Golden Ratio will enable you to improve your understanding of eye pleasing proportions and will equip you to create better proportionate artworks.

8. In the Drawing Art Academy you will discover the correct way of holding pencil so your drawing will benefit from precision and freedom of pen-strokes.

9. By watching how to draw video lessons you will discover professional shade rendering by stroking and crosshatching.

10. In the Drawing Art Academy you will discover how to master your drawing skills, so you will be able to draw without such helping aids as rulers, compasses, and grey-scale value cards.

11. By watching the Drawing Art Academy video lessons, you will realize how to rely on your trained hand while drawing without limitation of drawing medium.

12. In the Drawing Art Academy, you will discover various methods of drawing in charcoal, carbon pencil as well as drawing in graphite pencil, and working in pen and ink.