Let us know what your experiences are with sketching before jumping to digital within your design process. Sketching can be used as a journaling activity to record and explore your interests. It can also be used to explore multiple options you could take in a particular design. It is necessary to clearly realize what you are going to design. Extract your ideas before you enter the editor and start the design.
I’m a Web Designer for DNN, where I’m responsible for designing UI elements, new product features, and enhancements to existing features. I spend my free time reading
design-related articles on Designmodo, Creative Bloq and Medium. For design inspiration, I often turn to websites such as Dribble and Behance. These online portfolio galleries are great for viewing how other Designers work and solve problems.
Advanced techniques
The art of the sketch is simple and one of the easiest to use brainstorming techniques. Sketching really helps me clear my mind of past projects and really focus on the task at hand. I started sketching in college when I was trying to figure out how to design newspaper pages.
There is nothing wrong with that, especially for your own experimental work. There is no quicker method for exploring multiple visual solutions than sketching though. Try to weigh the advantages of sketching in regards to the project at hand. Most artists will carry some form of sketch book around with them wherever they go; as inspiration can be found everywhere, plus there is always a chance to increase drawing skills.
Exercises to Improve Your Sketching
The first step of creating a successful drawing is in mapping out where all the main elements will go. You essentially want to make sure that your subject and all the other elements of the drawing fit within the edges of the piece of paper. It sounds obvious, but if you miss this step, it’s really easy to get carried away and get the scale and proportions wrong. You may feel the desire to skip sketching and jump straight to the computer or work out your solutions as digital sketches.
In rare cases, such as Leonardo da Vinci, the sketch itself is considered a work of art. You can even use various online software for this process. Paper or a whiteboard, a pen or a pencil are the only tools you need. Sketches can be used in very different ways in the design process.
Why Sketching is Important and its Role in the Design Process
Using something permanent like a pen or marker is best. The idea is to keep your sketches fast, rough and what is sketching in drawing dirty. This helps you worry less on design aesthetics and focus more on rapid formulation of ideas.
Start by trying to fill your sketchbook, practising different drawing exercises and trying different techniques. The process of creating a design or illustration at later stages involves refinement. The overall concept and direction of the piece may be working great, but one element isn’t. Often, this can be tightened up and corrected in further rounds of sketching. Of course, at some point a digital artist moves to the computer. The process of sketching then moves into digital drafts.
Line art
A sketch does not contain a lot of detail or refinement (well, it doesn’t have to). Get unlimited downloads of 2 million+ design resources, themes, templates, photos, graphics and more. Envato Elements starts at $16 per month, and is the best creative subscription we’ve ever seen.
- When you’re ready to start sketching, begin by lightly outlining the shapes of your subject with a hard pencil (H).
- For design inspiration, I often turn to websites such as Dribble and Behance.
- Plan meetings where participants will be expected to sketch.
- Keeping your sketches is so important because old sketches can be a very personal source of inspiration.
- It doesn’t require amazing, or even good, drawing skills to work out composition before opening up Photoshop.
The two methods in sketching are line drawing and shading. If you ever find yourself in a situation where you need sketch on wet paper, I recommend a pencil with a hardness of 6B or higher. It is precisely these little things that make it so important to look properly at your reference. So before you draw the first line, you should ask yourself whether you are just drawing from memory or whether you see the shape exactly as it is in front of you. A sketch is a simplified, rough representation of a living being, thing, or space. It involves capturing an idea, moment, or figure on paper.
How is Sketching Used in the Design?
In the early stages of my web design career, I would start designing directly in Photoshop without any planning. This method often led me to designing websites with terrible user experiences! Sketching helps discover potential issues and solutions early, prior to starting the design and development stages. The term is most often applied to graphic work executed in a dry medium such as silverpoint, graphite, pencil, charcoal or pastel. It may also apply to drawings executed in pen and ink, digital input such as a digital pen, ballpoint pen, marker pen, water colour and oil paint.
It involves quickly sketching a subject while trying to capture their gestures in just a few strokes. This type of drawing can help you become more familiar with the movements of people or animals, which will come in handy when sketching complex scenes. Regardless of where your final product will be published, sketching can help you better conceptualize, create and collaborate on design projects.
Neglecting this step is not wise because it helps discover the most brilliant ideas and solutions. It does not require any specific skills, it is fast yet very efficient. You will know that it does not require brilliant drawing skills to create a quick sketch before starting to work in Photosho or Illustrator for logos. Create graphic design sketches to craft the basic composition of illustration and evaluate the choices of layouts quickly when designing websites, etc. Sketches can be easily created using pen and paper or a whiteboard.
