Basic Pencil Drawing Techniques

Beginning pencil artist often struggle with their works when it comes to making them look realistic. They key to a realistic pencil drawing is the shading. Perspective and proportion are very important, but if you don't get the shading right, it definitely won't look right. Shading your pencil drawing can be quite difficult. Many people don't realize that it's not as simple as coloring a picture. There are many different shading techniques that will help beginners improve on their pencil drawings. These techniques are very basic and some of the most commonly used techniques for pencil artists.

Pencil Drawing Techniques- Hatching
Hatching is the most common technique and the easiest technique for pencil artists. Hatching is simply filling in an area with either vertical or horizontal parallel lines. With this shading technique, you don't have to fill in the entire area. The closer together your lines are, the darker your area will appear. Also depending on the thickness of the lead of the pencil you are using, your lines may be very dark or very light, so be sure to take that into consideration when you are using this technique. Also, remember that objects are very rarely the same shade all over.

Pencil Drawing Techniques- Cross Hatching
Cross hatching is another very popular technique and it is just as simple as hatching. The first part of this drawing technique is hatching, you fill in the area with the technique above and after the area has all the parallel lines, you go back in and add lines going to opposite direction. This technique is used for the darker areas of an object because the overlapping of lines makes the area much darker.

Pencil Drawing Techniques- Stippling
Stippling is probably a technique that most pencil artists have already used whether they know it or not. Stippling is the using of very small dots to create value. It is very easy to do. If you want to make a dark area, you do more dots and if you want a lighter area, you do less. This is a very easy technique to avoid value breaks because you can always go back in an add more dots where need to be to make the transition from one shade to another more smooth.

Pencil Drawing Techniques- Scumbling
Scumbling is the least structured out of all the basic pencil drawing techniques. Scumbling is the making of very small, often curved, lines to create the value of an object. Many people who frequently use scumbling to shade their pencil drawings use lines that look like half circles, but scumbling is not restricted to that. The lines can differ from one another and this technique is most often used to create interest and texture in pencil drawings.