The Bare Bones

Before any toning of a drawing can begin you have to first get to what I call the ‘bare bones’ stage (the bare bones of the drawing) which is laying down all the features of the composition that can reasonably be represented by an outline as accurately and lightly as possible (fig 1). It’s up to you how far into the subtly detailed areas you go with this but the aim is to get all the proportions as close as possible before you even try and tone (hatch) anything. The sharper and more precise the lines used in the latter stages the easier it is to judge the subsequently finer proportional adjustments as you go along.

In the initial stages of laying out any freehand drawing that you intend to make proportionally accurate and highly detailed the primary consideration is to keep all the initial sketch lines soft and light so no damage is being done to the all important paper surface so you can move and adjust your lines sometimes many times as you refine your initial sketch up to the bare bones stage (and beyond). For this reason you really don’t want or need your pencil tip to be too sharp as it doesn’t matter if the first