3 Rules For Sketching Outstanding Realistic Drawings

Even expert artists occasionally struggle with crafting realistic three-dimensional pictures. Naturally they know the fundamental principles and produce naturalistic drawings intuitively. Only occasionally even the most experienced discover parts in their work that look distorted and unnatural.

For novices it is even more difficult, they have to exercise hard to climb a steep learning curve. It's long-familiar that good drawing skills are the result of hard exercising. Instead learning the three most crucial rules of third-dimensional drawing will make things easier for you. They will be a shortcut to better drawing skills and help even experienced artists to pinpoint elements that need a makeover.

So what makes a picture look naturalistic and three-dimensional? There are three rules that contribute to the realistic outlook of your pictures. Each of them has to be understood thoroughly. Collectively they guarantee outstanding outcomes:


Composition

Perspective

Lighting and Darknesses

Composition

Does composition actually contribute to the three-dimensional appearing of your drawings? Naturally! The three-dimensional outlook of any picture is strongly influenced by the relation between the different objects within the picture. You can produce an image consisting of objects that all follow the laws of perspective and have perfect lighting and shadows. But a bad composition will spoil most of the three-dimensional appearance.

There is just one crucial composition rule: let your picture's objects intersect! Frequently I see beginners averting to let elements in their pictures intersect , because they're afraid to mess it up.

Indisputable - if your picture has lots of overlapping parts it is more difficult to depict. There are more shadows and also perspective and proportions of the objects must be much more exact.

That is demanding indeed. Tightly arranged elements in your picture will relentlessly uncover all weak points. On the other side when you manage to get the perspective, lighting and shades right, a closer composition will beef up the three-dimensional appearance.

So have bravery to arrange your picture's elements nearer together. Let them intersect and demonstrate how good you are able to draw them following the rules of three-dimensional pictures.

Perspective

Creating a drawing employing correct perspective is the moment where a bit bit maths comes into play. No need to worry - no complicated know-how, simply drawing some additional lines.

When producing a picture keeping the laws of perspective in mind you ensure that:


your drawing's elements have the proper proportions and size

your drawing's elements have the proper deformation according to the distance of the viewer

your drawing's elements are correlating properly to each other

All this is accomplished by employing one simple rule:

" Objects and parts of them get smaller the further they are away."

This rule cannot be emphasized too much. Once you fail to apply it properly, your drawings will appear warped and awkwardly. So drawing some additional lines will help you to apply this rule properly.

Light and Shadow

The proper lighting and shading is the 3rd vital law for realistic appearing three-dimensional scenes. It's because of the lights in your drawings that shades emerge. And shades are necessary for a realistic appearing drawing - except you depict "gray rainy day" scenes only.

To craft realistic shades there are some rules you have to consider:


you must recognize where exactly the illumination originates from

this enables you to find the right size of the shadow

the right bearing and direction for the shadow

and the proper silhouette of the shadow

Unluckily realistic dark shades aren't that comfortable to create. But there are some helpful tricks. Just in this moment I'm writing on a tutorial revealing these methods stepwise. It will follow here soon.