Just a quick dragon sketch. It's based off a dragon figurine I painted a while back. I wasn't in the mood to do a fully rendered image. Today was all gray and gloomy, I wanted to draw I just couldn't muster up the energy to care. Plus the easer on my pencil was bad and I couldnt' find my good mechanical eraser so I didn't feel like getting overly detailed when I couldn't even erase my mistakes.
2 comments:
Good start!
HEY!
WAIT ONE MINUTE!
an eraser?
You still use an eraser?
When sketching?
tsk. tsk.
Throw that useless piece of rubber away.
Seriously.
Again, when working on a final illustration an eraser has a use and a place. But when sketching it is full of lies. The lie is that you don't make mistakes. You do. And the more you leave a trail of marks behind showing your mistakes, or in the case of drawing 'finding the line' the better.
Not using an eraser and leaving your sketch marks servers several purposes in sketches. It is a document of your process. When you look back on a finished sketch a month or year later you will SEE what part of the sketch was giving your troubles. If you find that you struggle with understanding and visualizing a particular part of human anatomy or landscape then you can focus on that.
Secondly,as you challenge yourself to improve at drawing those things that are difficult now, your sketch marks will be a chart of your progress. You'll notice in your later drawings that it takes you fewer exploratory marks to find "the line."
Third. Confidence. Both real time and historical. You will gain a confidence in your drawing skills by foregoing the use of an eraser. Historically, as i noted above as you look back over time you will see an historical chart of your progresss in improving your drawing skills, as your later drawings will have fewer exploratory sketch lines and will be executed with greater confidence.
Abandoning the eraser is not an easy thing for a young artist to do. It is a crutch, a security blanket that we cling to. But you don't need it, and it only holds back your growth and development as an artist. It puts you in the mind set that every drawing has to be perfect. This runs counter to the very purpose of sketching. Sketching is practice. Sketching is where you get to fall on your ass trying to do a triple axel. (sorry figure skating geek here) You need a safe environment to explore and fail. That environment should be your sketchbook.
So, how do you abandon the eraser?
Easy. Sketch in pen. Or better yet black permanent marker. Not all the time. Let's just say for quick gesture drawings. Or you can say every third drawing. Drawing with pen in immensely different than drawing with pencil or charcoal, as i'm sure you know. So the goal isn't to replace pencil with pen, but simply to use pen to get you past your dependence on the eraser.
Give it a try.
Yey for dragons! And it is a good start.
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