“Can you give tips for how to draw realistically?”

Annie Irwin, Teaching Assistant

I think the number one thing about drawing more realistically is learning how to see. We have so many ideas of what we know. When you think of a baseball, you can picture it in your head.  But when you actually look at a baseball, you get to see so much more detail, and you get to see the light in the room is hitting the shape of the baseball, and how the stitches actually form around the object. So all of that is about learning how to re-see. So when you’re drawing, you need to draw from life. Drawing from life is so much more dynamic than looking at an image because there’s so much more content, and you have the opportunity to arrange your objects.

Another really important factor about learning to draw realistically, is trying to capture the essence. I know that sounds a little funny, but actually looking at something and saying, “What do I need to put on the page in order to capture the idea of this object?” By doing that, you’ll be able to start making sure that you are recognizing this object without spending a ton of time on detail. Kind of like the gesture, and the gesture of that form, are the forms together, help get the drawing going, so that you don’t get caught up with those tiny details. The more you’re able to capture the gesture, the more you’ll be able to draw realistically from what you see.

Somebody once told me that you want to spent 80% of your time looking at the actual object in front of you, and then 10% looking at the page. So that you’re really training your eyes to understand the whole object when you’re in the drawing process. The other 10% is dedicated to looking at the page and checking the relationships from object to object in order to draw realistically.