You’re in math class, bored. As your hand wanders away on your notebook, doodling little hearts and flowers and swords and whatever else you can think of, so your mind wanders too. By the end of the year, perhaps your math notebook has more sketches than your actual sketchbook. Perhaps you don’t see the need for sketching and see it only as something to turn to when you’re bored. And yet, there’s so much importance buried in this seemingly simple practice. What is sketching for anyways?
To start, a definition of sketching may be useful. An art encyclopedia defines sketching as “a preliminary rough type of drawing that an artist might make in preparation for either a painting or a more formal drawing” and “a useful way for an artist to capture a fleeting impression of a scene or person before it changes.” From both of these uses, it’s clear that sketches should be relatively quick. After all, when trying to capture a “fleeting impression,” you need to be pretty fast. Maybe there’s time only to capture the pose of a person, or only their facial expression. Let’s take a deeper look into how sketches can be used both for preparation and for capturing a moment.
Think about how you would start on a project, whether a drawing or a painting or something else. Maybe you know what you want to draw but not how you want to arrange it. The last thing you want to do is spend hours drawing it, shading it, adding details, and so on, only to discover when you’re finished that it’s kind of smushed towards one side of the paper, or there’s too many objects on the bottom half, or there’s some other problem with the composition. You’ve now spent hours on a project that looks, well…okay. How can you avoid this? By sketching out your composition beforehand. Put a few quick ideas down on paper first. Try arranging it in different ways to find the best composition. Look at your sketches and see what you like and don’t like about them, and then make more sketches until you’re pleased with the composition. Then you can begin your project, confident that you have a strong composition after spending only a few minutes on different ideas. The sketches should be very minimal, only giving you an idea of where the objects will be, and if relevant, where the shadows will lie so that you can see if the lights and darks are balanced. Here’s an example from planning a still life with an onion, a tomato, and an apple. There are hardly any details, only the shapes, shadows, and minimal shading.
Sketching a composition can also be helpful if you’re working on a project with a client. It’d be frustrating to spend all that time on something only to discover that the client doesn’t like something about it. But if you can give them a quick sketch of the idea first, then they can approve it or offer comments about what they like and don’t like.
Lastly, sketching can be preparatory in that it can show what might need more practice. For example, in this sketch for a project a couple years ago, I noticed that I struggled with the form of that one hand.
In the next few sketches I did, trying to figure out the composition, I kept having a hard time with the hand. From this I realized that I should practice drawing hands a bit more before starting the project. In this way, sketching can highlight areas that may be difficult and may need more practice before starting.
In addition to preparation, sketching is excellent for capturing ideas, inspiration, moments, poses, colors, and more. Maybe a neat idea comes to mind, but you have class in ten minutes. There’s no time to sit down and start a detailed drawing of your idea, but you have a minute or two to go grab your sketchbook and jot down the very basic idea to work on later. Or maybe you have the opposite problem—you’re out of ideas. You have artist’s block. Well if you’ve packed your sketchbook with ideas, you can go flip through it and find one that inspires you. Maybe you have an idea now but don’t think you could pull it off well or are too busy to work on it. Sketch it out anyways. Then you can always come back to the idea.
Maybe you’re visiting a new city and want a way to capture the parts you love and want to draw later, back at home. You could pull out a phone or camera and snap a photo, yes. But you could also bring along a small sketchbook and pencil and capture the parts that inspire you the most. Sketching it yourself also gives you the opportunity to capture the image in a personal, more expressive way that maybe later reminds you why that one place inspired you so much.
Lastly, there’s a different type of sketching known as pochade. This one differs from the typical pencil sketch in that it’s used to capture the color or lighting. It can be especially useful for landscape paintings where the lights and colors can change quickly. If you can note down the colors first, then you can refer back to those when the light changes. I also find it useful for choosing a color palette and seeing if the colors I pick work together. For example here, the quick color sketch of the painting is more helpful than just the color swatches as I can see how the colors interact and whether there’s too much or too little of one color.
And in this one, I finished my color sketch and realized that I didn’t quite like the shade of green in the trees, so I was able to change that in the actual painting.
Overall, these different types of sketching can be very useful to plan, practice, and prepare for bigger projects, as well as to record ideas for later. Since they’re meant to be quick, don’t worry about making “mistakes” or drawing something perfectly accurate. Focus more on getting the idea down and expressing what you want to express. Now go fill those sketchbooks!
Sketch by Kate M.
Visual Arts Submissions:
Next month’s topic is Materials. This could be literal drawings of art supplies, an artwork where you think the material plays a significant role, or anything else you can think of that has to do with art materials.
Submit a piece of your artwork that fits this theme for a chance to have your art featured as the cover photo. A couple more may be chosen to be included within the article. This will be a good way to both share your artwork with the clay community and provide some inspiration to other readers.
Please submit through this Google Form: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSd-rFWU-nF4TmCC65tqWVBNL-AE9N2FkklsOcnecjBB8XiQwA/viewform?usp=sf_link
The submission deadline is October 25th. Let me know in the comment section if you have any questions, and I’m excited to see your artwork!
Cover Photo:
Bronwyn Dix – Pointe Shoes
Photo Credits:
Author unless otherwise noted
Works Cited:
http://www.visual-arts-cork.com/sketching.htm