How to Sketch – 15 Tips For Better Sketches That Come to Life

Drawing in a sketchbook...teaches first to look, and then to observe and finally perhaps to discover… and it is then that inspiration might come. - Le Corbusier

Whatever your reason for sketching, there’s always room to improve. Luckily, ‘sketchbookers’ throughout history have built up a treasure-trove of experience in techniques and tricks.

We’ve gone to look for the best advice on sketching from history’s best sketchers themselves.

1. Make the sketchbook your friendn

All drawing takes practice. But since sketching is so much about capturing things on the spur of the moment, sketching only when you’ve already planned to is not enough to truly practice. To practise sketching, one must practise sketching spontaneously, and for this one must always have a sketchbook close to hand.

Countless great artists have carried a sketchbook with them wherever they went. Pablo Picasso used his sketchbook to continually practice his technique. His notebooks are full of draft drawings for some of his great works, as well as copies of paintings he liked or simply sketches of the view from his studio.

Filmmaker Guillermo del Toro uses his notebook to detail ideas for his films, his writing interspersed with illustrations of weird and wonderful fantasy characters, captured whenever the idea for them came into his mind. Other artists also use their sketchbooks for noting down fleeting ideas for their later use; British ceramic