Drawings are the core of a portfolio

You might take fifteen digital paintings with an impressive corporeality of technical skill, but none of that will matter if you accept poor drawings. In terms of drawing media, the vast majority of high schoolhouse students are creating tight, conservative, photo realistic pencil drawings drawn from photographs.

Drawing is not about just copying a photo equally accurately every bit possible; we now take cameras that tin do this instantly with incredibly precision and quality. Ask yourself, what you tin express with your cartoon that a camera would not be capable of producing by itself.  What types of marks and imagery can you create that are unique to your drawing materials?

Don't skip traditional cartoon media

It'south great to accept experience in art media similar photography, video, digital painting, cinemagraphs, etc. but we don't recommend working in these other media at the expense of gaining strong drawing skills.

Not simply will experience with traditional cartoon materials help you with your art portfolio, but these new skills will only enhance and support your artworks in other media, it'south a win-win situation. Make room for all of these media!

Combining digital & traditional media

You can also try combining digital media with traditional media, which is a corking way to run into how these different media can interact together.

In this Character Design tutorial, True cat Huang demonstrates how she begins her sketching process in a sketchbook with pencil, segues to an ink drawing, and and then finishes the final pattern by adding colors in Photoshop.

This approach allows True cat to get the best of both worlds, exploiting the special talents of each media to get the most efficient results.

Character Design with Photoshop & Dip Pen

Drawing is a foundation

Prof Lieu once had a student who claimed "I'm going to major in Architecture, so I don't need to learn to depict."

Nothing could be further from the truths.  Architect Frank Gehry starts out the get-go role of the process with quick gestural sketches of his buildings. Sculptor Claes Oldenburg, who creates awe-inspiring public sculptures starts out with cartoon to think through the design process.

Drawing is applicable toall areas of visual arts.  Jewelers will sketch out their jewelry designs earlier getting started with expensive materials similar metals and stones, industrial designers have to present drawing to explain their proposals for projects, painters unremarkably start with drawings to map out their ideas for a painting.

This is why drawing needs to be highly prioritized in the fine art school portfolio, because the skills y'all gain from the drawing process volition ultimately exist useful no matter what area of visual arts you finish upward going into.

Drawing show an artist'due south process

Part of the procedure of improving your drawing skills is to look atdrawings past artists from history.  Ofttimes times people retrieve that all that matters is that they look at images from art history.  Actually, looking at a painting to try to understand drawing tin be problematic.

The problem with looking at paintings if you want to study drawing is that paintings cover up all of the mistakes, all of the false starts that an artist goes through. Painting is also a much more circuitous fine art media, there are so many tools and supplies you can employ that the unabridged process sometimes gets in the way of seeing a bare, naked marking that drawing reveals so well.

Paintings just bear witness the finished production, you don't get to go behind the scenes the way y'all would if you look at an artist's drawings.

Don't know where to outset? Our Resources department lists both art historical and gimmicky artists who piece of work in drawing volition get you started, only practice a Google Image search with their name, and tack on "drawing."

How to Start Learning Art History

Learn from historical drawings

In a drawing, y'all'll become to see all of the mistakes, you'll see the mess that a drawing tin can beginning out as. In a painting, all of those mistakes go covered up, you don't get to run into the artist stumbling in their cartoon process.  Expect carefully at an erstwhile primary drawing, you'll get to see evidence of the artist trying to describe that arm three, 4, or 5 times before settling in on it'due south concluding form.

Those mistakes are and then important to see, to see that even Rembrandt and Michelangelo didn't slam dunk their lines in their very first marks on a folio.  A lot of drawings really aren't that flashy, and a lot of them just look like loose marks on the page, but they're a means for you to enter the listen of an artist and see howthey run across their subjects.

In that location's a common assumption among high school students that groovy masters of drawing got everything "right" with their first few marks, only this isn't the example at all.  The drawing process is tons of troubleshooting, falling on your confront, searching for the lines you want; so little of it really works out just the way you want information technology to at get-go.

Drawings show the struggle

Many artists today don't show those less successful sketches that show their struggle. Frequently, about artists heavily curate what gets seen publicly online, selecting only their best work for viewing. This does a tremendous disservice to younger artists who are consequently given the impression that an artist should be able to practise great drawings every fourth dimension they sit down to describe.

When the messier, less impressive office of the drawing process is hidden from view, information technology creates the impression that professional artists don't mess upward with their drawings. Even professional artists who have decades of experience do bad drawings, information technology's simply a office of the process!

Even Michelangelo fabricated mistakes!

In this Michelangelo drawing of the Libyan Sibyl, (right image) at that place is a highly rendered figure in the middle.  Yes, yous'll learn from looking at Michelangelo'south articulation of the musculature of the figure, but actually, the very quick sketches of the foot and toe in the lower right are just as important.

These small sketches of the foot and toe show you the offset part of Michelangelo'southward cartoon process, dissimilar the highly rendered effigy which is much more polished.  Seeing such a raw form of Michelangelo's drawing is really revealing about what goes into the drawing procedure.