Basic drawing for coloured pencil beginners

By Carol Leather

When I was at school I was the kid who could draw. People said it, I believed it, and for years I assumed it meant something. It wasn't until I came back to art properly as an adult that I realised what I'd actually been good at was copying. Put a picture in front of me and I could reproduce it. Take the picture away and I was stuck.

If any of that sounds familiar, you're in the same place I was. And the news is better than you think: the things I was missing aren't mysterious or talent-based. They're four or five specific skills that nobody explains because everyone assumes you've already picked them up. You haven't, because they were never taught. That's the only reason your drawings feel off.

This page covers those skills as they relate to coloured pencil work. The reason they matter so much here is that coloured pencil is unforgiving of a wonky drawing. You can't easily paint over a mistake the way you can in oil or acrylic. Get the underdrawing right and the colour stage becomes the pleasure it should be. Get the underdrawing wrong and no amount of beautiful colour will rescue it.

Start by looking, not drawing

The first thing that changed for me was realising I'd been drawing what I knew, not what I could see. Ask me to draw a mug and I'd draw the idea of a mug: a cylinder with a handle. Put a real mug in front of me at a slight angle and I'd still draw the idea, because my brain was labelling the object ("mug") before my eyes had a chance to look at it properly.

Drawing well starts by quieting that labelling habit and seeing the four things that actually make up a picture:

• Shapes. Not "mug" but "an oval at the top, a curved rectangle for the body, and an irregular crescent for the handle". Shapes you can draw. Concepts you can't.
• Lines and edges. Where one thing meets another. Sometimes sharp, sometimes soft, sometimes lost entirely against a similar background. Edges are not all the same.
• Values. How light or dark each area is, regardless of its colour. A bright yellow lemon in shadow is darker than a white wall in sunlight. Value is what creates the illusion of form. (More on this in the value guide linked at the end of this page.)
• Negative space. The shape of the gaps between and around objects. The negative space between two leaves is itself a shape you can draw, and often easier to get right than the leaves themselves.

A quick trick: squint at your subject until the detail blurs and the lights and darks separate into clean blocks. That blurred version is what you actually want to draw first. The detail comes later, sitting on top of a structure that's already correct.

Break the subject down into basic shapes

An apple is a slightly squashed sphere. A pear is a sphere on top of a larger sphere, with the join blended. A teapot is a sphere with a cylindrical spout and a cone-shaped lid. A face is an egg shape with cylinders for the neck and (broadly) a cylinder for the head. None of this is the finished drawing, but all of it is the underlying skeleton.

Once you start seeing these shapes, two things happen. First, the subject stops being intimidating. A whole face is daunting; a tilted egg shape is not. Second, your proportions improve, because the basic shapes are easier to compare to each other than the surface details are. If the egg is tilted wrongly, the face will look wrong no matter how carefully you draw the eyes.

You're not drawing for show at this stage. The shape skeleton sits underneath the surface drawing and is mostly erased or covered as you build up the detail. It exists to make the surface drawing accurate.

Getting proportions in the right ballpark

Proportion is the relationship between the parts. The width of the mug compared to its height. The distance between the eyes compared to the width of the face. The size of the handle compared to the body of the teapot. Get the proportions wrong and every other thing you do will look slightly off, even if your shading is beautiful.

The classic technique is to hold a pencil out at arm's length, line it up with one part of the subject, mark the length with your thumb, then compare that length against other parts. How many "pencil-lengths-of-the-mug-top" is the mug tall? How wide is the handle as a fraction of the body? You're not measuring in real units. You're measuring in relationships.

The grid method is simple: draw a light grid over your reference photo, draw the same grid (lightly) on your paper, then copy what's in each cell. Your overall proportions are guaranteed accurate because the grid forces it. There's a separate guide on planning your artwork in the fundamentals hub that goes into this properly.

Train your eyes before you train your hand

The biggest jump in my own drawing came not from holding the pencil differently but from slowing down before the pencil ever touched the paper. The eye does most of the work. The hand just records what the eye has already seen.

Three things help:

• Trace the edges with your eyes first. Before you draw a line, follow that same line slowly with your eyes from one end to the other. Notice where it changes direction, where it gets sharper, where it softens. Your hand will follow what your eye has already mapped.
• Notice the angles, not the names. If you're drawing a chair, don't draw "the back of a chair". Draw the angle a particular line makes. Is it leaning slightly to the right? By how much? Angles are honest. Names are misleading.
• Flip the reference upside down. This is the single oddest technique on this page and the one that works fastest. When the reference is upside down, your brain can't label it as easily and you go back to seeing pure shapes. Most people are shocked at how much more accurate their upside-down drawings are.

Laying down a light graphite underdrawing

The drawing you do under coloured pencil is not the same as a standalone graphite sketch. It needs to be lighter, simpler, and less committed. Its only job is to give you accurate placement and structure. Everything else gets covered.

The single rule that matters: keep it light. So light you can barely see it. Heavy graphite causes three problems under colour. It smudges into the pigment and dirties your light areas. It indents the paper, leaving grooves the colour skips over. And it shows through pale layers no matter how much colour you put down. None of these are recoverable.

To stay light:

• Use a harder graphite grade. H or 2H, not HB or B. The harder grades give a cleaner, paler line that doesn't smudge. They feel scratchy at first if you're used to soft pencils, but the result is much better under colour.
• Hold the pencil loosely. Almost flat against the paper, so the side of the lead does the work, not the point. This automatically lightens your touch.
• Sketch the structure only. Outlines, key landmarks, the basic shape skeleton. Don't shade. Don't add detail. Detail comes in colour.

If you do go too dark, lift the excess before you colour. A kneaded eraser (the soft grey one you can squidge into different shapes) lifts graphite without smudging or damaging the paper.

For more detailed or symmetrical subjects, an alternative is to draw on tracing paper first, refine it as much as you like, then transfer the outline to your good paper using a light box, a window, or graphite-paper transfer. This keeps your final paper clean and lets you take as long as you need on the drawing stage without leaving heavy marks.

What to practise, and how

The fastest way to improve at this stage is also the most boring-sounding: draw simple objects, often, in graphite only, without trying to make finished pieces.

An apple. A mug. A pear. A shoe. One vegetable from the kitchen. Twenty minutes at the table after dinner. Not pretty pictures, just exercises in seeing the shape, judging the proportions, and laying down a clean light underdrawing. Date them and keep them in a folder. After a month you'll see the change. After three months you'll wonder how you ever drew the way you used to.

Don't measure yourself against finished colour work yet. The drawing stage is its own skill, and pretending it isn't (by jumping straight into full-colour pieces) is the most common reason people stall.

Common questions

Where to go next

Once the drawing feels steady, the next foundation to build is value: how dark or light each area is, and how that single thing creates the illusion of solid form. Value matters more than colour for making a drawing read as three-dimensional, and it's the next thing I'd suggest spending real time on.