Sketchbook Tour: A Four Phase Recipe for Developing Your Sketching Skills
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This video is a tour of my first sketchbook. The video also provides a four-step guide for those of you who do art for a hobby to improve your drawing and sketching skills. The four phases I describe here can be especially useful for beginners who would like to develop their drawing skills.
The following are the four steps/phases shown in the video:
Step 1: Practice line drawing and shades: This is just pen drawing to learn basic shapes and shades. More importantly this phase helps you to be confident and comfortable with sketching and helps you to make drawing your habit. Simply draw the things you would like to draw. As I mentioned in the video, the lines could be messy and lack discipline. That is not a problem at all. You will eventually draw much better if you keep practising.

Step 2: Practice free line drawing without using any references. Just draw from your imagination. This is a really relaxing and enjoyable exercise. Let the lines flow and develop into beautiful sketches. I usually start with one object, like a bin, vase, or a fence and draw everything else around it.

Step 3: Introduce colours. Once you have practices sketching, start colouring your sketches. Use a simple colour palette to paint your drawings. I use a basic Cotman watercolour set of ink and wash watercolour painting. Most of the time, I do not use a lot of colours. I only use a few colours for all my sketches.

Step 4: Gradually move to complex objects. Draw objects around you. Select objects with odd shapes and sizes. Find interesting combinations of objects to draw. Your drawings do not have to be perfect. The whole objective is to enjoy the sketching process. That will be a formative experience that helps you to improve the quality of your drawings significantly.

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