Basics

Tips & Tricks

Steffi 6. June 2023

Drawing tips and tricks

You can find it on this page:

With the tips and tricks on this page you will definitely get further in drawing and painting again. Sometimes certain techniques facilitate learning immensely. Try it out! 😉

Miscellaneous drawing tips

Utilizing Inspirations – Catalogs, photos, drawings, advertisements, and other visual and textual sources (stories, myths, legends, etc.) can be a great source of inspiration. If you have no idea how to find inspirations, I have written a blog article (in German) that can help with this.

Tracing your own sketches or other images to gradually develop your own final artwork can be very helpful.

A Line is a Line – When drawing with a pencil, you can erase incorrect lines. However, when using a pen or other non-erasable pens, you draw more thoughtfully and make sure to place the lines as accurately as possible. Nevertheless, there will still be incorrect lines, so it is recommended to create only sketches or drawing exercises in this manner.

Working Materials – A slanted table, a lightbox for tracing, a storage for the artwork, a brush for cleanly removing eraser residues, etc. – there are many tools that facilitate drawing and managing the artwork. It is important to always sit comfortably and have sufficient lighting.

Practice Makes Perfect – No matter how talented you are, if you do not practice regularly and set new standards and goals more and more frequently, you will hardly improve. However, it should always be enjoyable. If you don’t enjoy it, the work can only go downhill.

Show it for Correction – If you cannot identify any “mistakes” or areas in need of improvement in your artwork, you can present it to an impartial person and ask for their opinion. It is often like proofreading your own written texts where you have to search for mistakes; you overlook them repeatedly, so you can have them checked for correction – similarly, you can have your artwork checked for correction.

Seek Criticism – Ask friends or relatives to look at your artwork and give their opinion. But do not take criticism personally. No friend wants to deny or belittle your skills; they want to honestly tell you where there is still room for improvement.

Enlarging/Reducing

To enlarge/reduce, lightly draw a uniform grid with a pencil on the corresponding image (or on an overlaying transparent sheet). On the sheet where you want to draw, you also need to draw a grid that is proportionally larger or smaller (as desired… but they must have the same number of squares).

Now, either enlarge or reduce, square by square, the lines of your original image into the corresponding squares of your new image. You will see that it works (practice makes perfect, as the copy may not be 100% accurate). Then, erase the grid squares.