My YouTube channel has an active community of subscribers and sometimes they ask questions I think many artists have.

This great question/comment from Frank has given me a lot to think about:

“I feel like getting the rough drawing—relative proportions, angles, negative spaces—and the ability to convey any object's weight and form are the most important topics-questions for me.”

Getting the Foundation Right

I think conveying an object’s weight and form is the highest aspiration when learning to draw from observation.

Getting the rough drawing—the foundation—right, early, is the most important goal.

I find it helpful to first pick three of the strongest angles and their bordering negative shapes. This helps you place it on the paper so you don’t run out of room later. These first marks are the most important of your whole drawing. If they’re not right, nothing else you do will matter.

Then pick a few more more prominent angles and compare them with the edges of the paper and the previous angles you’ve sketched in.

As you focus on making these early marks as accurate as you can it lays down the strong foundation you need to convey your subject’s weight and form.

Also, when you work from large forms to smaller forms it keeps you from diving into details too soon.

This would be a satisfying drawing if I did nothing more than finish it as a line drawing in pen and ink.

Even without shading, the object’s weight and form are conveyed because the proportions are correct. The lines are shaped the way they are because that’s how they wrap around the 3-dimensional objects.

There Are No Shortcuts

A lot of beginning artists will try to convey weight and form with different shading effects. Of course, if the proportions are right then the different shading techniques can certainly help add to the sense of weight and form.

But if the proportions aren’t right, trying to cover your mistakes with shading won’t hide the underlying flaws.

There are a lot of YouTube videos offering “tips and tricks,” but these shortcuts are ultimately of little value if the underlying proportions are wonky.

And to make things worse, when the drawings don’t look like we want we beat ourselves up thinking we must not be “artists” then.

Ultimately “Tips and tricks” videos do more harm than good when you’re trying to learn the fundamentals.

I think the best advice I can give a beginning artist—any artist, really—is to slow down and take more time observing before making marks on the paper. Your lines will be placed with more confidence.

Look for the Shadows

The drawing at this stage has accurate proportions, the edges are defined and the objects themselves are clear. Even though I was focusing on the angles and negative shapes it is the objects that stand out to the viewer.

The photo was taken on an overcast day but you can see where the light direction is coming from by looking for the highlights and shadows.

You’ll find that when your drawings look good in the early stages you’ll be in a better position to know when to stop. There’s less erasing and your drawings won’t feel so overworked.

In this drawing I was limited by my choice of materials. The paper is just plain copy paper and I used a 6B pencil.

When Is it Finished?

How do you know when your drawing is finished? For this one I let the limitations of my materials guide me.

Knowing I couldn’t get much darker I realized that if I kept adding details on the ground it would pull focus away from the milk cans. I couldn’t increase contrast by going darker so I needed to keep the foreground lighter. It felt right to me so I stopped.

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