How to draw children: step by step guide

2024 Author: Leah Sherlock | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 05:25

Drawing people is a good activity for all artists. Sketches, as well as detailed drawing, allow you to study anatomy in practice. In this article you can find useful tips on how to draw children.

Pattern Composition

The first step is to think about the composition of your drawing. Composition is the correct arrangement of objects in a picture so that it looks interesting. Illiterate compositional work will not be able to hold the viewer's attention for too long.

Determine what should be the main thing in the work. If this is a figure of a child, then the rest of the objects around should be parts of the environment that create an atmosphere or support the figure (table, chair, stone, etc.).

The perfect composition is when the drawing can be viewed endlessly, wandering around the various details and not missing the main thing.

Teaching children to draw: anatomy

It is worth remembering that children's anatomy is significantly different from that of an adult. Proportions, that is, the ratio of body parts, very often do not coincide with the body of an adult. This is especially pronounced in adolescent children. Get ready to portraya short person with a slightly larger head.

Unlike an adult figure, in a child's figure, the head will occupy approximately 1/4 or 1/5 of the entire body.

The easiest way to quickly and correctly learn how to draw children is to mentally break the child's body into its component parts. It is customary to designate arms and legs as bowling pins, and at the joints (knees, elbows, transition to the foot) balls of different sizes are drawn. This structure allows you to then connect all the figures, creating the muscle mass of a person. Make sure that the segments of the arms to the elbow and after are the same length. The same rule applies to the legs.

Face

Be sure to build a face. Construction is drawing lines on which we will draw eyes, nostrils, lips. You can set serifs that will limit the size of facial features. It is recommended that you make sure to make such serifs for the nose, eyes and lips before drawing them. This makes it possible to check proportions before making many mistakes.

If the face is in full face - both halves will be symmetrical. If the head is turned, observe the perspective. This means that one half of the face will be smaller and shifted up (if you are looking from below) or down (if you are painting from above). The difference in size should be barely noticeable. Correct perspective is one of the most difficult tasks if you want to learn how to draw children.

It is very important to work out the details. Emotions are one of them. In children, as a rule, feelings are manifested outwardly brighter than in adults. Therefore, answering the question of howto draw children, it is very easy to portray sincere joy or sadness by lifting the corners of the lips or arching the eyebrows of a child.

Clothes

When depicting a child's clothes, it is recommended to focus on something discreet or light. These can be inconspicuous things that do not distract from the emotions on the person’s face. However, you can work out another artistic solution - themed clothes and decorations. For example, images of a pirate, a wizard, a warrior look very good in drawings.

We must not forget about the shadows on the face, clothes, arms and legs when we draw children with a pencil. Shadows are drawn in stages like this:

1. Trace the shaded area.
2. Mark the highlights so you don't paint over them.
3. Smoothly shade the darkest shadows.
4. With a harder pencil, make the transition to penumbra.

Environment

Having clarified all the details, we start drawing the background. You can depict an indistinct shaded spot. Against this background, the figure of the child will look contrasting and expressive. If you want to add atmosphere, you can draw a room, a forest or a ship deck. The main thing is realism. Pay attention to the texture of objects: wood, stone or clouds - these shapes can be shaded in different ways. For example, softer shading is suitable for fabric; for a tree - rough strokes denoting the bark. Do not overdo it with the background so that it does not distract the viewer from the human figure.