How to Paint and Draw

Are you ready to paint and draw? In this special edition from ImagineFX magazine, top artists share their techniques and advice on how to create great art, whether you’re using oils, acrylics, watercolours, gouache, pencils, ink or more. We start on p6 by refreshing the fundamentals of drawing and sketching, from the different ways to grip a pencil to how to draw and combine shapes. From there, we’ll lead you through more advanced tips and techniques, from shading to basic anatomy. Then on p54, our focus switches to painting, from setting up a dedicated art workspace to the secrets of different paints. Are you using the right brushes and paper for the kind of art you wish to create? Find out here. From p96, we delve deeper into art theory,…

You’re fairly sure you know how to hold a pencil, right? Well of course you do... but are you holding it correctly? The grip we use for day-to-day writing is very inefficient and will limit you in many drawing scenarios. Quite simply, drawing from the fingers and wrist alone (which is the narrow range promoted by the standard hand writing grip) doesn’t release the full potential of movement that drawing from the entire arm and shoulder affords us. When it comes to drawing, you need to retrain years of accumulated muscle memory that is dictating the way you make marks. Once you weed out these bad habits, your visual vocabulary will broaden with each drawing session. A better grasp will literally leads to a better grasp, because once you gain…

Breaking any process down into small chunks is a great way to tackle what can seem like a daunting task. When it comes to drawing, if we break a subject down into simple shapes we can begin to describe its overall structure. In the opening stages of a drawing you should be looking to describe your subject, and its environment, in very simple terms: always avoid details too early on. By drawing with simple shapes we can focus on proportions, composition, planes and the relationships between forms. It’s all about working big down to small; simple to complex; basic shapes to crafted details. There are three basic shape archetypes that any form can be fitted into; the cube, the cylinder and the sphere. At the heart of these form shapes…

By now you already know the importance of breaking forms down into simple shapes. Not only does this make the whole drawing process easier to manage but it also ensures that proportions and foreshortening remain accurate throughout the rendering stages by establishing them correctly early on in the drawing. On the following pages, we’re going to explain how to combine different shapes to create objects. I’m going to kick things off with a studio-based, still-life scene. A still-life affords us the luxury of dictating what we study (if you struggle to draw certain objects try adding them to your still-life for practice) and the angle we view them at, plus the lighting in the scene – something that can be tricky to control with an outdoors landscape. In this instance…

Whether you’re doing quick sketches and layouts, or highly realistic pencil renderings, graphite is a wonderful way to produce a variety of different looks. But buying the right pencil for your needs is largely a question of trial and error. When first becoming acquainted with using pencils for artwork, we’d recommend buying one of each grade from 9H-9B to become familiar with the hard/light and soft/dark qualities of each. Experiment with various surfaces, and a wide variety of strokes and mark-making (see pages 8-12 for more on that). BLEND AND SHARPEN After gaining an understanding of the abilities and limitations of each pencil, you can then investigate further with blending tools and erasers for different effects. A blending tool can be anything you can use to add texture to your…

Drawing with ink is a big step up from drawing with graphite. The most obvious difference is that there’s no more relying on the eraser, but it can be a wonderfully creative medium. Here’s how to get started... Traditional pen and ink consists of black ink and white paper, creating space through thick or thin lines, repeating marks for texture. Ink drawing techniques can be as delicate or bold, as your temperament dictates: it’s all about trying things out. First of all, pour your ink in an inkwell high enough so that when the nib touches the bottom, it covers three-quarters of the nib. Start with the focal point, working your way back and out to the lessimportant elements. Grip the pen close to the tip and keep the angle…