Drawing Straight Lines

For any artist working in any visual medium the ability to sketch and draw completely freehand would have to be the most important foundational skill to have bar none. It matters not whether your work leans toward representational or abstract art, consciously practising and developing your hand skills, drawing techniques, and proportional judgement would have to be by far the most effective way of vastly improving your arts practice across the board.

Although I have worked in a lot of different mediums over the years, 2B graphite for me has always had a magical potential that personally I doubt I will ever find the end of. It’s a perfect medium for both raw beginners and master artists, a true level playing field.

My frenetic journeying with this one grade of pencil over a long period has allowed me broad insights into every aspect of drawing practise from the utterly fundamental to the arcane subtleties of chiaroscuro (figure 1). From my own experience I have realized that the majority of students (and artists) either breeze past mastering the fundamentals of freehand drawing technique without ever realizing just how