The Basics of Sketching

Alrighty. Sketching. One of my favorite parts of the drawing process. Well, most of the time anyway.

A sketch of basically the rough guidelines of what you want your drawing to be. I like to break my sketches up into two parts; the primary sketch and the detailed sketch. For today's lesson, I'll be talking about the primary sketch.

Basic Shapes

Shapes make up everything around us. In some cases, it's more obvious. Your phone is a rectangular prism. The moon is a sphere. But sometimes, you really have to look at an image critically to distinguish shapes.

No matter how difficult it is, though, it will really benefit you on the long run to break an image down into shapes rather than lines. But I'm getting ahead of myself. We aren't on references yet, we're on sketches!

Basically, your simple sketch is going to consist of simple, 2D shapes on most occasions. There are always exceptions, but this is a good rule of thumb. So that's what we are going to work on on this lesson.

I've completed an illustration ahead of time to use as an example for these lessons in Unit One. (Just FYI, Unit One will have six lessons and six assignments. This is the longest unit that I have planned so far.) For this unit, I will be drawing an OC that I adopted from Birchspirit named Rowanstripe! Below I will show what I have as my primary sketch:

Let's break it down.

The circle on the farthest left is the head. See it now?

The middle circle (or oval) is the chest area, and the last circle is the hind leg and haunches.

The four lines are the legs. In this drawing, Rowanstripe is walking with his head down and hi so tail dragging in the dirt. Hence the bendy legs.

In conclusion, my definition of a primary sketch is the most basic, bare-bones draft of an image. It only consist of the basic framework of the character. Later we'll talk about refining a primary sketch, but that's it for this lesson! Be sure to leave any questions or suggestions in the comments!

Posted on Thursday, Feb. 18