19 Tips To Help You Draw More Accurately
This is a transcript of a podcast . The YouTube Version can be viewed here:
How do you become better at drawing accurately? That’s what this podcast is about. It will present 19 tips which broadly fall into two camps: one is about tips that allow you to draw more accurately, and two is about becoming better at measuring your mistakes so you can correct them or even avoid them in the future.
Also, in the video accompanying this podcast you see me drawing using the FREE Art Flashcards app from the Practice Drawing This website . Please find the link in the description of this podcast episode.
Welcome to the Practice Drawing This podcast designed to listen to while drawing!
Tip 1: Draw, Measure, Correct.
If you draw from observation, maybe you consistently draw heads too big. Or maybe, when you draw buildings, you draw perspective lines too tilted. When we see a smile, we may exaggerate that smile and draw the mouth way too wide.
We artists, especially when we start out, have a habit of exaggerating things we notice. If we notice an angle is tilted, we draw it *too* tilted.
When you consistently get things like angles and proportions wrong, the most direct way to improve your drawing abilities is to do the following: look at what you are drawing, try to notice a certain angle or a certain proportion, and draw it by sight, and then *measure* it on the model or reference, and measure it in your drawing, and correct accordingly.
What this does is it informs you about your biases. Maybe you draw heads too big. I drew lower legs too short for a while. You discover these biases by drawing by sight and then measuring how far off you were. If you consistently draw a certain angle or proportion incorrectly, this is how you find out.
How do you measure?
If you are drawing outside, and you are for example drawing a person, hold your thumb on your pencil so you can mark a length of the pencil. Hold your hand one arm’s length away, and decide on one unit of measurement, for example a head. Then use that head to measure the rest. Maybe the person is sitting, and their knees start around one head below their chin, and maybe their feet end two heads below that.
When you are for example drawing buildings and need to get the angles of the roof right, again look at the roof, try to remember the angle, draw it, and then again use your pencil, hold it in front of you along the lines of the roof and notice the angles, and compare it to the angles you drew on the page.
After you measure, you correct. In time, you will notice your biases, things you typically draw too big, angles you typically draw too steep, and you will know to adjust for your biases and become better at drawing things accurately.
Tip 2: Draw Bigger
I see many photos of beginners who draw tiny in their sketchbooks. That is of course fine! If you draw small, you can draw in a smaller sketchbook, one you always have with you. And I get it, you want to save on paper, reduce costs. Drawing small, you can fit many drawings onto one page.
But if you are like that, and you are frustrated about the drawings coming out all wonky, I suggest you try to draw bigger. Buy inexpensive newspaper paper if you want. It’s dirt cheap so you will worry less about it costing a lot of money. Newspaper doesn’t last many years, though, so just initially try it as an experiment to see how you feel about drawing bigger. You might find you like it.
About the cost: paper does cost money, but it is not expensive-expensive. Consider you draw on a large sheet of paper. Say it costs fifty cents. You can easily spend fifteen to twenty hours making a drawing on that. Now consider that you could have made, say, ten euros or dollars an hour in that same time. That means you could have made 150 to 200 euros or dollars in that same time. That just dwarfs the fifty cents you invested in the paper. Also, the cups of coffee you drank while drawing amount to way more than the cost of the paper. Why would you save on the cost of paper, when the end result can be a piece that will last for decades drawn on archival quality paper that cost a fraction of what you spent on the coffee you drank while making the piece? Drink one less cup of coffee, and spend just a fraction of the money you saved on coffee lavishly to buy premium paper.
Back to the topic of drawing bigger: traditional illustrators know this: if you draw bigger, and then reduce the reproduction size of your illustration, the drawing will look much tighter, the mistakes will be less noticeable. This is because the mistakes you make are proportional to the size of your hands. If you typically make mistakes where you might deviate two millimeters, those two millimeters matter if your drawing is two centimeters in size, but two millimeters matter less if your drawing is say fifty centimeters in size. Having said that, even when you draw bigger, you will notice that millimeters often matter, especially in certain details like eyes and corners of mouths. More on that later.
Tip 3: Take A Step Back.
This relates to drawing bigger: we only see sharp in the center of our field of view, and this can be a problem when we draw big. We tend to stand close to the drawing and if we draw big, that means we only look at a small part of the drawing while we draw, and we don’t notice the whole thing as a whole. What can then happen is that we draw things incorrectly relating to each other. Perhaps we get proportions wrong because we couldn’t relate them to each other. We draw the feet as we look at the feet, and we draw the head as we look up close at the head, but we didn’t take in the whole piece, so the relative sizes of the head and feet might be off!
The trick to solving this is to take a step back so you can take in the whole piece. You will notice mistakes you didn’t notice from close up.
This can be hard in the beginning as you lose yourself in drawing details and forget to take a step back, so set a timer that warns you to step back, until it becomes a routine, something you do automatically.
Tip 4: Take Pictures Of Your Art.
Relating to stepping back, is taking a photo of your drawing with your mobile phone.
I noticed this when I would take a photo of a drawing to share on social media: I previewed the drawing, and immediately saw mistakes! For some reason, the fact that you are looking at it at a smaller scale—similar to when you step back—is that it makes you see mistakes. It can also be because the contrast is different in the photo. When you do this, you see more mistakes for some reason.
Tip 5: Flip The Drawing, look at it in a mirror.
Another thing you can do is look at the drawing in a mirror. Again, you will see mistakes in the mirrored version that you do not see in the normal version. I have to be honest; although many people mention this option, I don’t use it as much as it doesn’t help me as much as the other options. What it does do is help you see if your composition is out of balance. You might not see it, but when you flip the drawing, you see it.
Tip 6: NOT Drawing
One mistake novice artists make when doing model drawing class is they draw the figure, and they also try to draw in the face. The problem is that you are working with a stub of charcoal, not exactly a precise instrument, and the face will be relatively small on the page. Further to that, you need to draw the eyes and the corners of mouths accurately, otherwise it doesn’t look good. And, oh, did I mention; there is time pressure as the model changes poses regularly.
Add to that that the exercise is to study human anatomy and gesture, of the body, not the face. And add to *that* the fact that if you suggest center line and eye line on the head, your brain fills in all the details and sees a face there!
All this is to say that your model drawing will look better, and more accurate, if you leave out these details that are unnecessary in this case.
So tip 6 is not drawing details that are unnecessary and require great precision. The result will look more accurate if you leave them out, and the brain of the viewer will fill in the details.
Tip 7: Rotate The Page.
When you draw long straight lines, you will notice that it is best to draw them from your shoulder, or at least your elbow, and preferably not from your wrists and certainly not from your fingers.
This is different, by the way, when you draw in small details. Then it is fine to draw using your fingers to move the pen or pencil around.
For longer straight lines, you will therefore notice that you draw straight lines better when you draw them at certain angles because it invites a natural movement from the shoulder or elbow.
This is not always possible. For example, when doing model drawing class and working on large sheets of paper held on a board on an easel, you can’t easily rotate that board around. Also, with very large sketchbooks, it can become impractical. Another example can be seen in the video that accompanies this podcast episode: I draw straight lines in it without rotating the page. I do that because rotating the page would give the viewer of the video vertigo. It is quite unsettling to constantly see the page rotate.
But when it is an option, try rotating the page to get more accurate straight lines.
Tip 8: Use The Right Tools.
Speaking of long straight lines: why not use a ruler? When drawing circles and ellipses, why not use a compass, or a circle and ellipse stencil? I myself find it boring to draw that way, but when precision is important, you could use these tools.
One cool trick when free-hand drawing long straight lines: hold your head close to the page and look along the line. You will instantly see if it is straight, and you can adjust in pencil accordingly.
Tip 9: Use Grids.
One reason to use tools to draw straight lines is to construct grids. For example, you can draw a perspective grid using a ruler, and through that make it possible to accurately draw something in space.
You can also draw a grid of squares on a reference and on your page and use that to copy the original to somewhere else. For example, if you want to copy a sketch in your sketchbook to a large canvas for drawing, draw a grid over the sketch in your sketchbook, and draw the grid on your canvas, and copy the grid cell by cell from your sketchbook to the canvas.
Relevant grids can help you more accurately construct things.
Tip 10: Refine. Improve accuracy by repeatedly drawing refined versions of sketches, one over the other.
I saw the legendary Glen Keane do this in a video: he would make a character design sketch on his animation board, and then put a sheet of thin paper over it so that you could see the sketch through the sheet, and then he’d make a more refined variant of that drawing, and he’d repeat that process until he was happy with the design.
You can kind of see me doing the same thing in the video that comes with this podcast; in it, I draw three-dimensional letters in rotated boxes. I do that by first sketching a box, then sketching a letter inside that box, and then lightly erasing the sketch and then drawing a tighter version of that sketch over it, and then I ink over it. Each stage is a more refined, more accurate version of the sketch underneath it.
Painters do this, too: they first make an underlying sketch of what they want to paint onto the canvas, as a scaffolding for the final painting, and then paint over it to create the final painting.
Such under-drawings are also particularly effective because they are easy to change still. It’s easiest to fix incorrect proportions in the sketch stage. It will hurt considerably if you have a painting that is almost finished, with lots of details, only to then realize that a certain proportion is off. Now you have to fix the proportions and redo all the details.
Tip 11: Modify Your Perception
This exercise is from the book Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain: one of the first exercises is to draw something upside down. This is a useful exercise for beginners for the following reason: your brain is constantly simplifying what it sees, and so if you try to draw something, you draw what you remember of it, which is the simplified symbol of the thing rather than what it actually looks like: a composition of abstract shapes and lines that, when copied to the page, evoke the same visual effect as the real thing, the object re-appearing on the page.
If you are still at this stage, you draw symbols, and the exercise to draw something upside down will bypass the part of your brain that tries to simplify things to symbols, simply because it doesn’t understand what it sees. All you are left with is the abstract shapes which, if you copy them carefully, make the image come alive on the page. Beginners tend to draw something better upside-down than not, because they copy the abstract shapes more accurately.
So this tip, tip 11, is about improving your accuracy by disabling that part of your brain that modifies your perception. You can practice this by drawing things upside-down, but you don’t have to draw things upside-down for the rest of your life. It just makes you experience copying abstract shapes faithfully, which causes the image to magically re-appear on your page. The secret to drawing realistically.
Tip 12: Draw Outlines First.
Another, related exercise from the book Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain is to draw so-called negative spaces: the outline of the world outside the object. Take a chair as an example. The legs can consist of all sorts of wooden parts that create holes in the abstract shape that forms the outline.
This, again, is a way to disable that part of your brain that tries to simplify things to symbols. Forcing yourself to draw the outline first forces you to focus on the abstract shapes.
Then you can fill in the details inside.
I find this tip extremely useful when you need to draw something complex which you need to represent accurately. An example is a hand: with a hand you think “palm of the hand”, and “fingers”, and “thumb”, and those are symbols. By drawing the outline of a hand first, you bypass that part of the brain that simplifies to symbols.
Try it yourself: try to draw the outline of a hand accurately from observation, and then fill in the details like fingers and the thumb. The hand will look better.
Another good reason to start with the outline of the thing you want to draw is so that you can make sure it fits in the area on the page you designated for it. On the page I am drawing in the video that comes with this podcast, you can see lots of letters drawn next to each other. I managed to do that by first approximating the box around the letter onto the page as a shape, thus making sure the letter would fit on the page there and leave little room between it and the other letters next to it.
But it can also be used to for example make sure a model fits on the page when doing model drawing class, that sort of thing.
Tip 13: do the dexterity exercises explained on the Practice Drawing This website.
If you use the free Art Flashcards app on the Practice Drawing This website, the day will start with a dexterity warm-up exercise—which you can skip if you want, but I highly recommend you try the exercises if you want to become better at drawing lines accurately and as intended. They can be used as short warm-ups before you start drawing and can be done anywhere and anytime even without something to draw. If you have a small notebook and pen with you, you can literally practice drawing anywhere and anytime and become better at placing lines accurately and with intent.
There is also a guide on the website which explains the dexterity exercises.
The exercises amount to drawing lines in such a way that it becomes immediately obvious and visible if you drew it inaccurately. This direct feedback allows you to try and re-try and improve with each iteration, making you better at placing lines accurately and with intent over time.
Tip 14: Memory Drawing Exercises.
People mistake the usefulness of memory drawing exercises. They think the main purpose is to memorize that one thing. This is not so. The main advantage is that it is incredibly effective at training you to eyeball things, to see when a line is off and why, and how to fix it. You effectively become your own teacher that way, seeing the mistakes you make and seeing the fixes.
In the video that comes with this podcast, you can see me eyeball the lines. It’s not that I don’t make mistakes—I do, and I see them. I was perhaps a bit too hasty in starting to ink, locking in the mistakes. But I see them and know how I should fix them.
I didn’t practice drawing these letters in rotated boxes from memory. I practiced drawing other things from memory, and that made me better at eye-balling it.
What it basically boils down to is that you look at a reference, then put it away, then try to draw it from memory, then correct it with the use of the original reference consciously noting what you got wrong and trying to come up with mnemonics that help you remember, and then you put your drawing and the reference away and you try to draw it from memory again.
And what that boils down to in practice is that you only look at the page while drawing, and you’re constantly evaluating lines, seeing where you want to place them in your mind’s eye, drawing them, evaluating if they are off, correcting. You’re eyeballing, using your memory for reference, and therefore practicing eyeballing really hard.
This makes you much, much better at eyeballing, at drawing by sight, at drawing more accurately because you will see mistakes more easily and see more quickly how to fix.
Memory drawing practice isn’t really about memorizing things, but rather about becoming better at drawing lines where they are supposed to go. Memory drawing makes you better at drawing more accurately.
I suggest you try it out. Even if you just do it for one week, you will probably already notice improvement when drawing other things later.
The memory drawing exercise is intense, so I suggest you only do one, for five to fifteen minutes each day. You could do them as a warm-up.
One cool thing is that you can even do this drawing exercise when you don’t have drawing tools with you: you can look at something, close your eyes and imagine drawing it, then open your eyes again and see where you were off. This makes you better at drawing also!
If you want to explore this further, I have several resources on memory drawing on the Practice Drawing This website , see the links in the description that comes with this podcast episode.
There notably is a guide, and a workbook for memory drawing, and the free Art Flashcards APP also has stages where you draw things from memory.
Tip 15: structured ways to give yourself feedback and how to act on it.
I got this trick from a drawing coach. Take a page, and write at the top left what you want to practice on that page. Then do that practice, and write down notes on what you got wrong or want to improve. Then at the bottom right of the page, write down take-aways, things you learned you are doing wrong and want to improve. Then prepare new pages, one for each thing you want to practice, and write that thing you want to practice in the top left of that page.
This is a very structured way of practicing and improving. It goes well with memory drawing because, as explained, memory drawing makes you better at seeing your mistakes and seeing why they are mistakes.
Tip 16: Leaving It For A Day Or More.
One trick writers use is to create a first draft, print it out and stash it in a drawer for six weeks. Then they take it out and edit it. When you’ve been away from that text for so long, it is as if someone else wrote it and you see it with a fresh pair of eyes. Also, you are less emotionally attached to it and can take a hatchet to it more easily and edit it quite a bit. If you just wrote it, you still remember how much time you put into each sentence, each word, and you will be less willing to make changes.
Especially when we start out, we artists tend to want to finish a drawing in one session. But why not let it rest, even if only for one day? You can take a look at it with a fresh pair of eyes the next day, perhaps using the other tips, like taking a step back, looking at it in a mirror, taking a photo of it with your mobile, et cetera.
If you can put the drawing away for longer, that is even better as it will hurt less to make big changes to the drawing as you are less emotionally attached to it, as you drew it a while ago already.
Tip 17: Knowing What To Get Exactly Right.
Here’s the thing: some things are extremely hard to draw because of the amount of accuracy required. Things like the face of a beautiful woman or a child, or hands. This because we know what they are supposed to look like as we’ve seen these so often. The smallest deviation from correctness hurts our eyes.
Corners of mouths you need to get precisely right for that same reason: they disproportionately convey emotion and so you have to be very precise with them. We are constantly evaluating the facial expressions of people around us and we are sensitive to the slightest change. A reason Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa is so special is that she has a “mysterious smile” caused by the corners of her mouth having been painted vaguely.
Some things you don’t need to get as accurate. For example, you have considerable leeway when rendering clouds or trees because their organic forms can vary so freely and wildly. You can draw these loosely and they can easily be believable. Also something like a dragon is easier to draw for that reason: who knows what dragons look like, after all. You don’t have to be as precise.
There is 3D model on Practice Drawing This (see link in description) which is interesting because of this: it consists of an arbitrary two-dimensional shape pulled up in space. When drawing it, you don’t have to get the shape accurate. It is okay to deviate from it a bit and it will still be a correct shape. But when drawing the vertical lines that show how it is raised in space, those are lines that should go along perspective lines to a vanishing point, and these you do need to get exactly right, or else it will look wrong.
Tip 18: Exaggerate On Purpose.
Here’s an interesting bit of information: you have these caricaturists who draw caricatures on the street. You sit before them and they draw you a caricature of your head. If you were to ask them to draw your portrait, chances are they’d refuse, because a portrait is much harder because of the accuracy required.
When you exaggerate facial features, you don’t have to be so precise. If draw a portrait, you have to get the nose exactly right, but if you exaggerate the nose size, it doesn’t really matter that much how much you exaggerated it.
You an make it easier for yourself to draw more accurately by drawing things in such a way that accuracy is less important, for example by exaggerating things like proportions and angles.
Tip 19: Slow Down, Don’t Rush, Take Your Time, Enjoy The Process!
This is something I had to learn in the beginning: I wanted the drawing to come out good so badly that I rushed the process and, of course, ended up demotivated, with a drawing full of mistakes.
There is no rush! Enjoy the process. Take time with each step. Draw, then measure. Take a step back. Slow down. No one sees how much time you took to draw something. They only see the end result. That includes you. As soon as it’s finished, you forget how much time it took you to make it, and all that you see is the end result. So why not slow down and make sure at each step that it is the best it can be before moving to the next step?
Start with drawing many thumbnail-sized sketches of what you want to draw. Try many, mull it over, leave it for the next day. Then maybe make a few preliminary sketches. Leave that for a day, and then slowly tighten the drawing you like most. Leave it for a day, see what you want to improve or change.
If you rush it, maybe a proportion was wrong right from the beginning, and maybe you’ll only notice after painstakingly having rendered it for a few hours, yielding a disappointing result.
This is also a case against accepting tight deadlines, or at least pushing back at them. People don’t see that you did something on a tight deadline. They just see the end result and evaluate it, and your artistic skills, based on that. So give yourself time to do it well.
Slow down! It’s not a race.
Is Accuracy Important?
Finally, after 19 tips on how to become more accurate, we come at the the question: is it even important to be accurate?
The answer is yes and no.
When conveying a certain effect, you need to be able to do so accurately.
When an inexperienced person draws, they draw inaccurately. It’s not the same as a loose drawing by an experienced artist. A loose drawing looks loose, but the “loose” lines are actually placed very accurately. If you don’t believe me, I invite you to try copying a Heinrich Kley illustration. They look so loose, but that is deceptive. They are drawn loose but the loose lines are placed exceptionally precisely. Your lines will be slightly off and it destroys the effect.
The trick to drawing loosely is to draw loosely with intent, with accuracy. The “loose” lines of the beginner are just inaccurate.
To be a good artist, you need to command control over such accuracy. Accuracy needs to be an artistic decision. If you can’t draw accurately, you are condemned to drawing inaccurately and it’s not a artistic choice anymore.
So it’s useful to train yourself to become precise.
However, there is also value in loose sketches! Especially when you are out and about, it is perfectly fine to make quick sketches of things. You’re basically making notes about details you see. When you are back in your studio, you can use these notes and make a tightly-drawn finished piece using the visual notes you made.
Also quick sketches meant to explore designs can best be done loosely and quickly so you don’t grow emotionally attached to them and are ready to toss them for better ideas. That is easier if you didn’t invest as much time in them.
So, whether accuracy is important depends on what you are trying to do and there are certainly situations where making quick rough drawings is the best approach. But it is useful to be able to draw accurately on command, when you need to.
Thank you for listening to this podcast, and until next time!