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Elevate Your Skills: 3 Drawing Techniques for Intermediate Artists

Feb 28, 2025

Once you’ve mastered the basics of drawing—such as outline work, basic shading, and proportion—it’s time to push your skills further. At the intermediate level, artists often look for ways to create more dynamic compositions, realistic textures, and a greater sense of depth. The techniques in this post will help you refine your approach to drawing, encourage you to add more detail, and guide you toward new creative horizons.

Intermediate artists typically have a solid understanding of form, line quality, and basic shading. Now, it’s all about sharpening your existing abilities and exploring concepts like complex perspective, realistic shadows, and advanced texturing. In the following sections, we’ll cover three essential techniques that will bring a professional polish to your work.

Two-Point Perspective

  • What It Is: Perspective drawing uses vanishing points to give the illusion of distance and space on a flat surface. Two-point perspective is especially useful when drawing buildings, cityscapes, or interior scenes with strong angles.
  • Why It Matters: By mastering two-point perspective, your drawings will immediately appear more convincing, especially when tackling architectural or geometric subjects. It helps avoid skewed objects and confusing angles.
  • How to Do It:
    1. Draw a horizontal line across your paper—this is your horizon line.
    2. Mark two vanishing points on this line at opposite ends.
    3. Sketch the vertical edges of your object, then connect the top and bottom of these edges to the two vanishing points.
    4. Add additional elements (windows, doors, details) while consistently referring back to your vanishing points.
  • Pro Tip: Make sure to keep your horizon line and vanishing points in the same place throughout the drawing. If you shift them around, the perspective may become distorted.

Blending and Smudging for Realistic Shading

  • What It Is: While basic shading often relies on hatching and cross-hatching, blending and smudging techniques aim for smoother transitions between shadows and highlights. Artists use tools like blending stumps, tortillons, tissue paper, or even a finger to soften pencil marks.
  • Why It Elevates Your Art: Blended shading can dramatically increase realism, particularly in portraiture and still life drawings, where subtle gradations of tone are critical.
  • How to Practice:
    1. Lightly shade a shape (such as a sphere), then use a blending stump in circular motions to smooth out transitions.
    2. Observe real-life references—notice how softly shadows fade and highlights emerge.
    3. Alternate between layering more graphite (or charcoal) and blending to achieve a three-dimensional effect.
  • Pro Tip: Keep a scrap piece of paper handy to wipe off excess graphite from your blending tool. This helps control the amount of material you’re smudging around and prevents unintended dark spots.

Textured Drawing and Layering

  • What It Is: Texturing is about creating patterns, surfaces, and details that convey tactile qualities—like wood grain, metal shine, animal fur, or fabric folds. Layering involves building these textures gradually with multiple passes of pencil work at varying pressures and strokes.
  • Why It’s Powerful: Attention to texture can transform a simple sketch into a richly detailed work of art. Texturing challenges your observation skills and forces you to be meticulous in rendering surfaces.
  • How to Begin:
    1. Choose a reference photo that features noticeable textures—like an animal portrait or a piece of weathered wood.
    2. Start with light outlines to mark where different texture sections begin and end.
    3. Gradually darken or refine areas by adding more pencil layers, changing your stroke direction for realism.
  • Pro Tip: Vary pencil grades (HB, 2B, 4B, etc.) to achieve a wide range of values and mimic natural textures more effectively.

Conclusion
Stepping into intermediate drawing techniques means diving deeper into perspective accuracy, refining your shading, and bringing life to your work through texture. Embrace these methods with patience and curiosity, and don’t shy away from challenging subject matter. As you practice and experiment, you’ll notice your art evolving into more detailed, visually striking pieces that reflect a maturing style and skill set.