Draw Place Blog

A simple pencil is more than enough to create a realistic drawing – you just need to know how.

Step 1
Make a sketch using a 2H pencil, trying to outline and mark the places where the tones will shift. When you are satisfied with the sketch, lightly go over the entire thing with an eraser to soften the lines.

Step 2
Begin hatching, starting with the eyes. Why eyes? First, the picture will already start to look alive, and second, eyes are the darkest part and can be used as reference for further shading and hatching.

Step 3
Use a 2T pencil to outline the hair growth direction around the eyes and on the forehead.

Step 4
Begin adding hair, starting from the darkest area – the eyebrow arc. Use short strokes to mimic short dog hair.

Step 5
Continue working in the same way to add hair around the other eye.

Step 6
Move on to an ear. Its darker shade helps separate it from the forehead clearly. Keep using short strokes and add small, sticking out hairs to avoid a hard transition between the dog and the background. When working the wrinkles in the dog’s skin, keep in mind that making them three dimensional is the key here. Do this by making the edges dark and adding light and shadow to the wrinkles.

Step 7
Start working on the second ear, again making your way from the darkest areas to the lighter ones. Don’t forget about the hair at the back edge of the ear.

Step 8
Now work the inside of the ear. Start by filling the entire ear with an even shade using a 2H pencil and try to keep the strokes the same colour (but don’t smudge the pencil work!). Next, take an HB pencil and start adding darker areas and more detail and definition, trying to keep strokes from becoming too obvious. Use a 2B and 5B pencil to darken the forehead as well.

Step 9
Move on to the nose and start by filling out the darkest areas but keeping them barely visible before moving on to a softer pencil and making the shadows more pronounced using a circular motion. Focus on the nostrils and use the softest pencil, 5M, to work on them. When you’re done with the nose, use very short strokes to draw the hairs above the muzzle, paying attention to the hair growth direction.

Step 10
Work on the muzzle, starting with even, midtone hatching before deepening the shadows of the darkest areas.

Step 11
Now move to the tongue, working the way you worked the ear – start with even hatching, making sure that individual strokes are not too obvious, then deepen the shadows and finally, use the edge of your eraser to create light reflections.

Step 12
Continue using the same method and move on to the jaw, paying attention to the many details in the dog’s mouth. Start with the darkest areas and work your way to lighter areas.

Step 13
Hatch the lower jaw.

Step 14
Draw the wrinkles (skin folds) on the neck and make sure to properly capture their volume. You will need to pay extra attention to the hair growth direction  (the hair is in the fold too, but the direction can vary with every fold). Start your strokes in the darker area and move to the lighter area.

Step 15
Finish working on the neck. That’s it, your drawing is now finished!

Are you a fan of drawing? Are you curious to see what other media can be used to create monochromatic pictures? Come join our drawing course and learn all about perspective, still life, figure drawing, and much more!

There are many cloud painting methods, and in every drawing or painting, clouds are always easy to identify even if they were created by beginner artists. Let’s not forget, however, that clouds are not just random, shapeless blobs in the sky. Keep reading to enhance your cloud-painting skills and improve your future artworks!

Beautiful clouds: five cloud-painting methods
The first cloud related decision arrives rather early, in the composition sketching stage, when you need to decide how much space your clouds will take up in the finished work. Do you want them to just spice up a simple blue sky, or are you going to make it super cloudy and really work on the details of your sky? Once you’ve got that figured out, follow the steps below to make your clouds look amazing.

In this article we will focus on cumulus clouds, the ones we see most often. Cumulus clouds come in many shapes and forms, they are dense, and their colour can range from snow white to menacing dark shades. Just look at our examples.

1. Wide, broad cloud

A cumulus cloud is usually rather voluminous, but still, parts of blue sky tend to peek through here and there. These clouds are nice and dense, and their shape and size vary greatly, so they are fun to draw. To make a wide, broad cumulus cloud look realistic, make sure to add some tattered parts to your sky as well.

Step 1

I decided to keep things simple and went for a simple sheet of watercolour paper and a single blue colour. Start by sketching your “holes” with tattered edges – this is the sky peeking through the clouds. Don’t put too much pressure on the pencil to keep the lines light – you will need to erase them or hide them later. 

Using watercolour, make a wide, smudgy cloud, using wet paper and filling your “holes” with light strokes of blue colour. Then, leave your paper (or at least the sky part) to dry for 30 minutes.

Step 2

Believe it or not, you’re just one step away from the finale! Add more colour to the blue spots you made in the previous step. As the paper was drying, the blue colour probably hid the pencil outlines, which is great – your clouds will look natural and undisturbed by anything that shouldn’t be there. 

Now apply another uneven layer of blue to a wet paper and watch it spread, gathering here in there. This is a great effect that we need and will use in our favour. Keep making your blue more saturated until you are happy with the result. And that’s it, you’re done!

2. Voluminous cloud
This is the most common type of cumulus cloud. They glide smoothly across the sky as we try to find familiar items and figures in their shapes. And the good thing about them is that they are very simple to draw.

Step 1
Draw a curved oval or circle shape. I like to give my clouds defined edges when working on illustrations for children’s books. Keep in mind that this is an outline, a sketch, so don’t put too much pressure on the pencil – you will need to erase these pencil lines later. Add a couple of lines inside the cloud’s body, making them look like small hills.

Step 2
Wet the paper around the cloud, keeping the cloud itself completely dry. Paint the sky blue.

Step 3
Only start working on your cloud once the sky around has dried completely. To add depth, emphasize the convex parts of the cloud with some grey (number 1 in the picture below). Add some wetness to slightly grey the areas around the “hills” inside your cloud and clean the edges with your brush (number 2 in the picture below).

3. The WOW cloud
This is the type of cloud you see when the weather changes suddenly, with fluffy white “hills” breaking out from the cloud.

Step 1
Make an outline of your cloud, just like in the previous example. This time place the “hills” above one another and some to the inside and around the edges of the cloud too.

Step 2
Wet the entire sky area. You can decide to keep the cloud itself a bit muted to make the picture more interesting (number 1 in the picture below). 

To create volume, I made the colour more saturated at the tops of the “hills” – another way to achieve a three-dimensional effect. 

Cirrus clouds can be seen when the weather is good, they are light and fly high in the sky. Their colour is a misty white, with spots and the structure resembling marble or sea waves. There are two different approaches to drawing them.
Blue on white
Wet the sky and a couple of blue curls, then let the paper dry. Repeat this twice to give the colour some volume and create soft edges, and don’t worry about any hard edges that might be there as a result of paper drying unevenly – they will fit into the picture nicely.

White on blue
If you choose this method, you will be applying white paint to a blue sky.

In this picture, you can see an example of this method – I painted the sky blue, let it dry, then mixed some white gouache with water and applied a few light strokes. Then, I wet my brush again to soften the edges that were too hard. And that’s all there is to it! You can even use white pastel instead of paint for this method.

Final tip – don’t limit yourself to one medium – experiment! These tips will all work for other techniques as well; just look at the charcoal drawing of a cloud below.

And if you are intrigued by watercolour, come discover its secrets with us and join our watercolour course for beginners!

Acrylics and oil paints are the most common paints in art.

The key difference lies in their chemical composition – while acrylics are synthetic and contain water, oil paints are composed of natural ingredients and their manufacturing involves dissolving the pigment in oil.

With that being said, many contemporary artists use both of them, often combining acrylics and oil paints in the same painting! In such cases, acrylics are used for a base and oils come into play to add surface details, a method that doesn’t require the artist to wait for the underpainting to dry completely. 

Let’s briefly go over the key properties of these two types of paints.

Acrylics are water-based and made with synthetic materials and they darken slightly once dry. 

Oil paints are made with natural oils (with a synthetic drying oil being used sometimes as well) and pigments. They maintain colour well after drying but require special canvas preparation before they can be used.

If you want to get more familiar with acrylics or oil paints, come try one of our courses! Our amazing teachers will teach you to work with them properly and share some tips and tricks to help you achieve amazing results. We look forward to seeing you!

There are plenty of various techniques in art – some are traditional, some are non-traditional, and some could be described as innovative, even. In general, an artistic technique is characterized not just by the materials used, but also by how they are used and applied. Length and direction of strokes, their brightness, the colour mixing method – all these factors are important, and they are also very individual, allowing each artist to create their own style. Still, there are some main techniques defined by the materials used to produce a resulting artwork. The most famous and the most popular techniques include pencil drawing, pastel drawing, watercolour painting, and oil painting. 

Pencil drawing is the simplest of them and it’s where most artists begin. Pencil drawing doesn’t require any special additional skills, and often pencil drawings serve as a preparatory stage for other techniques. However, there are still things to master in pencil drawing, like realism and precision or the secrets of hatching and shading.

Pastels require a rough surface with enough tooth and texture and allow you to both paint and draw with them – that means you can smudge the pastel to create a seamless layer over a larger area (painting) or use it to apply individual strokes (drawing). Pastels tend to look especially nice on dark backgrounds, which is why toned paper is often used for pastel work. 

Watercolour technique is a bit more complicated, and to many people it remains mysterious, perhaps even misunderstood. Its name comes from the Latin word for water – aqua, and the artist’s ability to control water mixed with colour determines how good they will be with watercolours. The paint itself is fluid and transparent, and very receptive to every move of the brush. Despite being sometimes misunderstood, watercolours are very popular with many great artists.

When it comes to oil painting, there are two distinct approaches: with or without underpainting. The first approach requires some rather complicated preparations, although there are no dogmatic rules when it comes to working with oil paint. The best thing you can do is to try them out and decide what works for you, and don’t get discouraged – even a non-professional artist can handle oil paint.

Recently, a new technique appeared and quickly gained popularity – digital drawing, with artists using drawing tablets and special stylus pens. This is great for both beginners and experts, and there are plenty of specialized programs that are designed to help both adults and children master digital art.

Whatever technique you decide to choose to develop and show off your creative abilities, don’t forget that only practice makes perfect. And for those whose heads are spinning with all the options to choose from there is also a solution – come to our drawing and painting course for beginners and let one of our amazing teachers guide you as you try your hand at all the most popular techniques to discover which one suits you best!