About Drawing:

 It should be understood that if drawing is taught and is taught well, 

then drawing can establish an ability that is fundamental toward human expression.

 Learning to draw will also contribute toward a greater understanding of all of the visual arts. Drawing teaches balance and order. The developed habit of looking, or seeing well, and then of expressing 

one’s perception in a graphic way will enlarge your awareness and your perceptions of the world around you. 

Learning to draw with a certain discernment will improve your critical ability to evaluate all things that surround you. With developing a greater skill at observation, will also establish a greater conceptual and critical ability. Drawing helps to find order from chaos. Additionally, your abilities to evaluate other works of art, regardless of the type or style ( other works of art,.......... fine art, any design, architecture, 

fashion, mechanical, etc.) will be vastly improved. Drawing is done with the elements of 

line, value, texture, space, atmosphere, solidity, fluidity and color (even if you are only 

working with black and white). 

We call these elements in any work of art ‘Form’. Good drawing is about good ‘form’ and seeing good relationships! These aforementioned abstract things (line, value, texture, shape, space, etc.) is what drawing is really about. 

Drawing is always abstract. Drawing is not about description, however description 

(detail) can be considered as a ‘formal element’ but not an entity. If description alone was 

what drawing was all about, then illustrations in dictionaries, or photographs could 

accomplish this feat of describing things extremely well. No,........ drawing is about 

design and composition, it is learned by organizing and putting together the abstract 

ingredients in a sensible way......making order out of chaos.

Overview

Drawing is a form of visual expression and is one of the major forms within the visual arts. There are several categories of drawing, including cartooning. Certain drawing methods or approaches, such as "doodling," other informal kinds of drawing, and the surrealist method of "entopic graphomania", in which dots are made at the sites of impurities in a blank sheet of paper, and lines are then made between the dots, may or may not be considered part of "drawing" as a "fine art". Likewise, tracing—drawing on a thin piece of paper, sometimes designed for that purpose (tracing paper), around the outline of preexisting shapes that show through the paper—is also not considered fine art, although it may be part of the draftsman's preparation.

The word drawing is both (1) a noun and (2) the present-participle and gerund forms of the verbdraw. To draw is to produce a drawing. A quick, unrefined drawing may be called a sketch.

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Drawings

Most people who enjoy drawing will probably have their own tried and tested methods, ideas and techniques. Lets face it, there are only so many things that you can do with a graphit or color  pencil - no matter how clever you are.

Pencils

Some pencil artist today prefer to work with mechanical draughtsmans style pencils. These mechanical pencils have numerous advantages over regular pencils. They are a constant length and so a constant balance, the leads are more regular and they don't need sharpening as such.

 also sharpen my pencils with a scalpel as opposed to a pencil sharpener, it maybe takes slightly longer, but this way I find I can get exactly the profile of lead that I want - impossible with a pencil sharpener. This is certainly not necessarily the best way to work and I wouldn't dream of suggesting to anyone else that they should do the same, it's just what I personally have gotten used to doing.

Other Useful 'Bits'

As well as the pencils and whatever paper or board I'm using when drawing, there are a few other items that I always try to have at hand before I start. By far the most used pieces of kit that I have are my trusty 'wet and dry' boards. These are simply pieces of wood or hardboard with 'wet and dry' fine grit paper glued onto them. These file boards are used to maintain a needle sharp point on my pencils, this being essential for really fine work. Another useful byproduct of my 'frantic filing' is the build up of graphite powder on these boards - very useful for rendering clouds, or large areas of smooth shading like the sky or background tones. 

I usually apply this graphite dust with either cotton wool, a soft bristled watercolour paint brushe, or applied with the tip of a cotton bud for shading smaller areas. Cotton wool and cotton buds also work very well on graphite applied with a pencil for smoothing or fading the edges of previously shaded areas. Obviously different tones being achieved by using different grades of graphite dust, just the same as using the pencils.

                       

                                                            Mistakes

Like everyone I make mistakes (Far too many actually) and on those occasions there are really only four options. They are the plastic rubber, the electric rubber, the putty rubber and the trusty 'Blu Tack' option........ (okay, maybe there are five options - if it's really, really, REALLY, grim - I may just bin it!). 'Binning' option aside though, I do still tend to use the putty rubber for rubbing out initial 'light' sketch lines when drawing out. But generally by far the most effective method of removing graphite without affecting the surface of the paper is Blu Tack.

regards,

Sanjeev AK Menon

sanjeevakmenon@gmail.com