How do I Do It?

I sometimes post on a Facebook group. Since the start of this year I’ve been mostly posting the ink drawings I’ve made in my new sketchbook. I’ve had some lovely comments and also a number of questions. So bearing this in mind I thought I’d share some with some of the answers I’ve given across a number of posts. So let’s begin with this question -

How do you do it?

Yes, a lot of people want to know what the secret is of being able to make such detailed ink sketches. Well, basically because my technique is all wrong.

I’ll do my best to explain that.

I’ve been drawing and sketching for as long as I can remember. When I was a kid I would often make pencil sketches copying pictures out of my comic books, for example. Line drawings for the most part. One day I took a book out of the library all about how to become a better sketcher. To say I was disappointed was an understatement. If you’ve ever read such a book I think you’ll know the sort of thing it was advocating – draw very faint basic shapes and boxes, gradually add the detail and make darker lines, etc. Yes, here’s more to it than that. Now that I’m older, a little wiser and a lot less judgmental I can see that this approach makes perfect sense and if you have little confidence and your hand-eye coordination is not that well developed then this is surely a good framework to help you develop. For one thing it would have meant I would have got better at placing the overall picture on the page a lot more quickly than I actually did. However, at the time I felt it was a lot of potch. I just wanted to get on with drawing what I saw.

You see my hand-eye coordination was already sufficiently well developed. I take no credit for this since as far as I can tell I was born with it, but I’ve always been able to judge distances between lines on a page, and between different features of a picture. I am still in some ways a very undisciplined sketcher. There’s no telling where I will start to make a drawing – well, on the paper, obviously, but not where on the paper. With faces it’s different because I always start with the eyes. I believe that if you get the eyes right your picture will eventually look like the subject. You can change other details, and even small mistakes won’t matter too much. If you don’t get the eyes right then it won’t look like the subject. Of course, when I was younger this did sometimes mean that the face would be too far to the left of the paper. With other subjects though I might start anywhere. While I might begin on the details on the far left and work rightwards, or on the far right and work leftwards, or in the centre and work outwards. Basically I find what I think of as an anchor point before I start. So in portraits you could say that the left eye is always the anchor point. I can’t tell you why I don’t start with the right eye, other that it just didn’t feel right the couple of times that I tried. If you look at these recent sketches I’ve marked the anchor points on them. These are where I made the first marks on the paper and as you can see, they’re all over the place.

When I start I never try to think about the whole thing. Instead I think of what I’m working on as a series of small pictures that relate with each other which makes up the big picture. When I’m on song I don’t even see it as small pictures but as individual lines that relate to each other on the page with my concern being to be true to this relationship in the way that I draw the lines.

A wonderful man called Tony Hart fronted a long running TV series for children called Take Hart, all about making your own art and I remember in one of the very earliest shows he demonstrated the importance of areas of shade in portraiture. I took that on board and I’m sure that my work improved a lot. I applied this not just when drawing people, but when drawing anything. Shading with pencil or charcoal is in some ways easier than with ink since you can vary the tone with a little less pressure or a little more pressure on the pencil. When I started drawing with ink I had to experiment with hatching and cross hatching to begin to get a feel for how to achieve the level of gradation that I wanted.

I feel that I’m fortunate that I know how to look at things I want to draw. Yes, of course I see the whole picture, or scene at first before I pick up the pen, but then I focus on small parts, which I try to reproduce on the paper. It requires some patience and also some confidence in yourself. It can take a long time before your drawing starts to resemble the subject and you have to have confidence that you’re doing well and if you keep going the picture will begin to emerge.

Which raises another point. Practice. I developed the confidence I mentioned through practice, which in my case meant just drawing, drawing, drawing. I can’t stress this enough. Keep drawing. 6 years ago I set myself the challenge of drawing something every day for a year. I started in March so in reality the challenge was to make a drawing every day for 365 consecutive days. Amongst the more challenging aspects were finding the time for a sketch every day and also selecting exactly what I wanted to draw. Making the drawing itself was often the easiest bit!

I’m going to summarise. If you’re kind enough to say that you like my ink drawings and you’d like to be able to sketch like me, the this is what I can tell you.

Your eye is just as important as your hand. If you want to sketch like I do the you have to see the relationships between small parts of the picture you will be drawing. Anyone can make a mark on a page. If you can make a mark you can draw a line. If you can draw a line you can draw two lines or more. That’s not the issue. The issue is getting the relationship between two lines accurately. Have you got the distance between them right? The different directions of the lines? Should one be thicker than the other? If you make a point of asking yourself these questions it will become something that you do automatically.

I start every sketch with an anchor point. This is the small feature of my subject that I am going to draw first. I work outwards from this point always looking to see what relationship the next mark that I make should have with the previous mark that I made.

As I work outwards I keep looking at my subject and noting areas of shade, and how they compare in terms of tone with other areas of shade. With careful use of hatching and cross hatching I try to get the appropriate level of tone for what I’m looking at. For example, the wider the space between the hatching lines the lighter the shading you’ll get and vice versa.

Concentrate on the small pictures that make up the big picture and the big picture will take care of itself.

Cast a critical eye over what you produce but be kind to yourself as well. Yes, if you think something didn’t work somewhere then it’s useful to ask why it didn’t work as well as you wanted. But it’s also very useful to spend some time looking at what you did well too. Just because you did something well once there’s no guarantee it will just happen next time. If you know how you did it and make a conscious effort to reproduce it next time, you’re more likely to succeed.

Keep sketching. That’s the best advice. Just keep sketching.