You make drawing a lot easier for yourself by breaking the major tasks into stages. Start your drawings with a light sketch to capture the posture, proportions, and angles of your subject. I use an erasable “col-erase” non-photo blue pencil to block in your initial drawing. I then draw directly over this framework with a graphite pencil, adding the details and texture. The blue pencil establishes the shape so I do not need to think about the fine grain detail and the big picture proportions at the same time.
The blue lines represent the first guidelines that I would establish to block in the bear. Once this blue pencil framework is complete, I go over it with graphite pencil to draw the details of the bear. In this series, I show the final bear drawing throughout the initial stages so that you can see how I simplify the shape. Real non-photo blue pencil lines are much lighter than the lines you see in this demonstration, they are barely visible but are exaggerated here to help you follow the steps. Play with these techniques and discover how to draw a bear.
Start with a posture line that captures the energy and movement of the animal. This is essentially the line of the spine.
Create a “proportion box” around the body. This box will be different shapes for different animals. For the bear it is a horizontal rectangle.
Establish the “belly line”. This divides the box into body and legs.
Block in the head with a circle for the brain case and a rectangle for the snout. Check your proportions. It is easy to make the head too big and too far away from the body.
Indicate the locations of the legs. Note that they do not emerge from the corners of the box of the body by in a bit in the front and the back.
Now use negative shapes to check the proportions of the legs. The space under the body is particularly helpful. Do not proceed until your negative shapes are accurate. Also use negative shapes to capture the angles at the front and back of the body.
Here we see the body angles as described by negative shapes.
These quick lines capture the shape of the body. This is the non-photo blue framework on which the graphite pencil drawing will be created.
Once you lay down dark pencil lines, your brain will ignore the non-photo blue guides and you do not need to go back in and erase them. This is a real time saver and a useful workflow.
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