6 drawing mistakes & how to fix them fast! – Veronica Winters Painting

As I’ve been teaching drawing since 2004, I see the same mistakes every beginner makes in his art. I’d like to list the most common drawing mistakes and how to fix them fast.

6 drawing mistakes & solutions:

1. You have crooked lines that make your drawing look uneven.

Fix: Work on the perfection of your drawing by checking the accuracy of your shapes in a mirror. When you look at your image in the mirror, your mind reads the information differently, allowing you to see the mistakes. The same happens when you look at your art upside down.

Look at your artwork upside down or in a mirror to catch the mistakes.

2. Your drawing lacks clarity.

Fix: Always shade right to the edge of your outline without leaving the uneven, white spaces. When we shade we have the tendency to lose the edge. As a result our drawing falls apart by becoming uniformly soft, lacking focus and definition. While not everything should be defined or outlined, most students have a problem of not “connecting” numerous lines that leads to uneven shading.

The solution is to outline the edge with the line of the correct value (tone) and shade right to that edge to restore the original outline.

drawing-mistakes-and-how-to-fix-them — The black lines show you where the unevenness of shading happens, creating the ‘broken’ lines that destroy the sense of the form. Shadows must look uniform without any white spots present in between your lines!

3. Your drawing looks messy.

When we sketch the lines graphite tends to smear all over the place. It’s important to keep the drawing clean to give a nice impression of a finished work even if it’s not finished. While it sounds obvious, you won’t believe how many students make messy drawings!

Fix: If you draw in colored pencil, it’s vital to keep all the graphite pencil marks super light and avoid smudging as much as possible. Kneaded eraser is your best friend. It doesn’t leave any residue on paper and erases softly.

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4. The objects in your drawing escape or fall off the page.

Start your sketch with the envelope where you mark the top, bottom and sides of your objects. Then draw inside those markings without “leaving” the envelope.

This sketch shows how to start drawing correctly by sketching out the "boundaries" of the object first, and then breaking them down to smaller shapes. — This sketch shows how to start drawing correctly by sketching out the “boundaries” of the object first, and then breaking them down into smaller shapes.

5. You focus on drawing the contour so hard, but it never looks right when you’re done.

Fix: always make directional lines first, and position your shape over that line. This technique gives you the right rotation & position of your subjects in space.