A few tips to help you learn to draw from life.
All tagged sketching
Drawing A Still Life
If you want to learn how to draw, you have to draw from life. Learning how to draw a still-life or how to approach drawing from life in general can be a bit stressful and even a little boring at times but there's no way around it. Once you start getting the hang of it, though, you'll start noticing great improvements in your drawing skills that are well worth the effort!
Sketching With Tracing Paper
Tracing paper is a great cheap alternative to a light box or light table. Tracing paper saves you the trouble of having to redraw something from scratch as you explore and develop ideas. It allows you to easily composite an image together, taking and adding elements easily without forcing you to commit to anything. It can also be used to create a clean version of a final sketch which can be transferred onto another surface or scanned to work with in a digital medium.
Use Tracing paper
Sometime in 2011 I posted a tweet that said “Too broke to afford a light box so I’m tracing my work on the window”. While that’s something we can laugh at, it’s also a real issue for many young artists. I wasn’t always able to go to my school’s library to use their nice light table. Not everyone has the money to get a light box and not everyone is a student with access to a light box. That's why the world invented tracing paper.
Start With Thumbnails
My process before going to art school consisted of two steps: draw it then color it. I’d start with the idea I had in my head, draw it as best as I could, then color it. But when it came to drawing things with backgrounds and other elements in them, it was overwhelmingly difficult to get a good drawing out. Then, when I got to art school, I was told to start with thumbnails.