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I hope you will find Drawing Matters interesting and I'd love to hear any comments or suggestions from you. Please feel free to forward it to anyone who you think might be interested. There is a link at the bottom of the page where they can subscribe.
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Anna Black

Course Dates

If you want to learn the five basic skills needed for realistic drawing you can do it a five-day intensive course. Although all the UK courses for 2008 are now full you can find out about courses in the United States by following the link at the bottom of the page.

All the 5-day courses being held in London in 2008 are now fully booked.

If you are interested in booking for next year but you are still sceptical that you will really learn the basic skills of drawing in just five days, here are some drawings by three different participants. None of them had any previous drawing experience or teaching of any significance.

All participants do a pre-instruction drawing, the self-portrait (below) was done on Day 1, before instruction by the participant, who on Day 2, completed this challenging foreshortened view of a hand (below right) as well as the drawing of a chair (below left) also on Day 2.

The sighting drawing, below left, was done on the 3rd day of instruction. This participant's pre-instruction drawing is shown below right.

Pencils are very personal! Everyone has their own style of drawing. One person's will be fine and delicate whereas someone else will have a strong and bold line. Neither style is better than the other it's just the way you are - your 'signature'.

I would suggest experimenting with different pencils and seeing how different the effects are that you can get with different grades of pencil.

Pencils are 'coded' according to hardness/softness. 9H is the hardest and 9B the softest. HB is middle of the range. I personally prefer a softer pencil and I tend to start my drawings with a 2B and then move on to a 4B when I want to get a good range of values and perhaps even go up to 7B/8B if there are really dark darks. But I will use an H pencil if I'm doing some really fine lines or delicate cross hatching (you can see a range of pencil lines in the drawing of Bazzle the poodle on the website).

Getting a good range of tonal values makes a big difference to how a drawing looks 'real' and three-dimensional. A beginning student is often reluctant to include dark darks and so their drawings might look quite flat tonally.

One thing to bear in mind though is that softer pencils are just that 'softer'. The line is thicker and smudgier so if you want to do detailed / clean lines then a harder pencil may be more appropriate.

I would suggest you experiment and perhaps buy a few pencils across the range (you can buy boxed sets quite inexpensively) and try them out and see what you like.