A Discussion of Pencil Sketching

Pencil sketches are one of the easiest types of image to do but they have their drawbacks. In this post I will discuss pencil sketching and show you some of sketches I have done in the past.
Most people when they start drawing start with a pencil. I started drawing at a very young age because most of my family enjoyed drawing.

I would often draw pictures of characters I liked from Sonic/Mario/Looney Tunes etc. and I would do landscapes as well as a few of my own creations- mainly dragons.

And this is will sound similar to most people who drew at a young age. Continuing on into secondary school (high school for you Americans) I would draw in the back of my school books whenever I got bored with my lessons, my friends did it too.

Most of my drawings have been in pencil and when a pencil hasn't been to hand I've used a pen. Sketching is the simplest thing to do and you only need a pencil to do it because pencils allow you to shade your images as well for detail.

No-one can deny that a well done sketch looks great and you can get away with having rough edges and dodgy lines, it's basically the scruffs version of art. It is very different to painting which often uses a variety of colours and is a bit more refined.

The main advantage to sketching is for when you are doing rough designs and ideas because they don't need to be perfect, they can be rough, ragged or just a mass of scribble. You don't see many finished pieces done in sketches. Finished pieces are done in colour using paints, inks, Photoshop, pastels etc.

The biggest downside to doing pencil sketches is the lack of colour. When you sketch in pencil you don't see the colours of the object you are drawing and if you only sketch then you won't develop the ability to see colours when doing other types of images and will find it more difficult to incorporate colour into them.

Take a look at the images below, all of which are in pencil and drawn by me a couple of years ago, they vary in quality and you can see how good a simple bit of pencil work can look.

To start with you can see how useful pencil sketches are for practicing your drawing and developing your skills drawing certain items in this example it's trees.

You can also sketch your own characters. Below is one of my own character creations. more on him another time I think. Using simple pencil work I was able to create a good looking sketch of a character I had envisioned although this is nothing like my first drawing of him.

This next one is actually a scene I came up with between a character and a henchman. Using pencil I was able to easily make adjustments to proportions and also get some heavy shading in in important areas.

The image below is actually from a picture of a bird. The original picture was taken by me a couple of years ago. 

 The final pencil sketch in this post is the greatest image I have ever done, which is pretty weird considering it is actually of 2 Brussel sprouts. The square overlapping the picture is an enlargement of a section on the left side of the page (you might be able to see the arrow). This close-up section has not been inlaid on top, it is actually a part of the drawing!
What makes this the best picture I have ever done, for me at least, is the sheer amount of detail gained using just pencil. I will point out that I used different grades of pencil when I did this. When drawing this picture I remembered what my art teacher told me "When you are drawing there should never be any white where there is no white". Well words to that effect. So wherever there was no white I shaded it in and blended it with my finger (basically smudging the pencil on the page)

Finally we have a pen sketch, this just shows the quality you can achieve when using a single instrument and really focus on the details, shapes and shadows.

So I think we can agree that sketching is still pretty awesome, right? But when you want to create a comic book character or design levels for a game or design a book cover etc. you will need to be able to complete it with colours, so it is better to start getting to grips with using them.

When you work with colours you  force yourself to pay more attention to them and start seeing them more. You notice different colours in the reflections of light off an object (an example here is that black objects seem to reflect light as both white and blue) and more importantly you begin to realize that shadows are not the main colour mixed with black to make it darker.

These days it is easier than ever to work with colours because most people own a computer and there are several image programs out there to use. All PCs come with paint but there is Photoshop and GIMP (Google Image Manipulation Program, this is free to download) that you can use as well. If you don't own a computer you can always get yourself a library card and use paint on one of their computers, just remember to take your USB memory stick/flash drive to save your image on.

If you do want to work on computers you will do yourself a favour by buying a pen tablet to use. Pen tablets use a pen and a tablet to allow you to draw as though you are doing it on a piece of paper. They take a bit of time to get used to but it is much easier than using a mouse or a track pad. More on pen tablets another time though.

If you've done some great sketches let me know and post a link to them. Remember that sketching is very useful for the initial stages of your works and can often, not always, benefit from being turned into full colour masterpieces.