Photorealism with a pencil
With practice and care, you can draw very realistic pictures with the pencil. You hardly need any equipment for this, but you need a good eye and patience. This is how you gradually approach a photo-realistic image.
Make preliminary drawings
Before you start giving your picture all the details that it needs for a photorealistic impression, create a preliminary drawing. If you are already very practiced, you can draw these freehand; for the greatest possible accuracy, work with a grid.
- Take your preliminary drawing and measure it. Ideally, the original will have exactly the same aspect ratio as your image. Otherwise, you can help by cutting the template or your paper.
- Then draw a more or less close-meshed grid over your template - depending on how good you are at freehand drawing. A good grid dimension is, for example, a 1-centimeter distance between the lines on an original sheet of about DIN A5.
- Now enlarge this grid according to the proportions of your paper to the template. Now draw the enlarged grid with very delicate lines on the paper with an HB pencil. You should now be able to see exactly the same number of grid lines on the template and on the paper.
- Now transfer your template onto the paper in a preliminary drawing, square by square. Use an HB pencil for this as well. At the end, you will erase all of the grid lines from your drawing. If necessary, trace the line of your preliminary drawing.
A soft pencil has many advantages, especially when sketching. However, also have ...
Here's how you go about drawing
The preliminary drawing is ready - and what happens next?
- What is required now is a very careful and precise approach. It is best to start your drawing at the top left (if you are left-handed, at the top right) so that you don't smudge the drawing with the heel of your hand. Work with 2B or 4B right away - very delicate shades can also be drawn in with 4B. In fact, the gray tones of the soft pencils match each other better and more seamlessly than a 2H and a 2B pencil.
- Now slowly draw exactly what you see. Take a close look - so even the smallest wrinkles or skin spots or other subtleties will not go unnoticed. Take your time - photorealistic drawing requires maximum concentration and leisure. It is therefore advisable to take a break after an hour at the latest so that you can see clearly again. You will find that you have more and more details, small shadows, etc. discover in your template.
- With a kneaded eraser you can lighten your drawing very finely and gradually. If the kneaded eraser is already dark on its contact surface, simply knead in the dirty area. You can also use this eraser to shape fine points and work very precisely.
- Slowly develop your own techniques. In order to draw the structure of the skin of a person who is no longer young, it is helpful, for example, to use the To gently shade the skin and then apply light twisting movements with an eraser to execute. The individual folds and larger pores must of course also be drawn in.
- Dare to use a 7B pencil to draw in blackness. Pictures live from contrasts. A pupil is mostly black, any cast shadows are very dark.
Tricks for photo-realistic effects
How do you get as close as possible to your template?
- Don't lose sight of the big picture over the details. To see whether the coarser shadow areas of your drawing match your template, look at both images with your eyes slightly distant so that they are slightly blurry are. So the details are hidden and you can see, for example, whether the shadows between eyebrows and eyelids are dark enough or whether the shadow areas on the cheeks are still being processed have to.
- Light reflections should never come into contact with the pencil. Avoid light reflections right from the start, because it is difficult or even impossible to erase a paper-white point in a hatched area with an eraser. However, light reflections must be paper white.
- For best results, use very smooth paper such as Bristol paper. Grained paper - even normal sketch pads - is too uneven. You will never be able to draw an absolutely flat surface on textured paper.
And last but not least: do not expect to immediately make a drawing that cannot be distinguished from a photo - it takes a lot of practice and experience. In fact, there are drawings that you can't even tell that they're drawn, even if you know. It just takes time to get there. Just try to improve a little with each picture.
