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How To Draw a Straight Line

This may sound like a bit funny but drawing a straight line is actually a pretty difficult thing to do. It is something you have to practice and there are a couple of tricks and techniques that I can show you that will help you not only in drawing straight lines but will also help your overall skill as an artist of fantasy art.

The Key to drawing a straight line is to not draw it all at once. You should move your pencil in short strokes and slowly extend the line as you go. The reason for this is because your hand, wrist, fingers are all designed around rotating joints and that means they naturally do circular motions and arcs. To do a straight line you have to make short motions and watch carefully with your eyes. As you are stroking out the line your eye will make adjustments. This is good, it means you are learning to see. The line may come out thicker than you wanted but you can lightly erase and redraw portions of it.

When drawing the line do not press hard on the paper. This will cause a crease that the pencil point will want to fall into. If the line is not straight the crease will guide the pencil out of line.

Also: You should rotate the pencil as you are drawing the line. Make a few short strokes with the pencil then rotate the pencil a bit in your fingers. Make some more strokes and rotate the pencil again. Continue doing this. The illustration shows pencil points. If you don't rotate the pencil the graphite on the tip gets distorted and will impede your ability to draw clean and straight lines. If you rotate the pencil regularly you will keep a nice rounded and even point.

Here is a video showing how to draw a straight Line

 

Let's Continue on with our lessons

 

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Fantasy Art School HOME PAGE

Fantasy Art Lessons

  1. lesson 1 - Holding the pencil and getting a feel for it and warming up with lines
  2. lesson1c how to draw a straight line
  3. lesson 2 - Drawing some simple geometric shapes
  4. lesson 3 - Understanding and using Perspective
  5. lesson 4- foreshortening in perspective
  6. lesson 5- Drawing depth and distance
  7. lesson 6-Using lines of varying thickness
  8. lesson 7- drawing form and shape with a medieval mace
  9. lesson 8- Drawing metal - We draw a medieval helmet
  10. lesson 9- drawing our first human form
  11. lesson 10- Distorting the human form to create fantasy creatures
  12. lesson 11 - doodling and creativity break
  13. lesson 12 - a Morning star mace - drawing textures
  14. lesson 13 - how to draw chainmail
  15. lesson 14 - How to convey action in your fantasy drawings
  16. lesson 15 - How to draw sword shapes
  17. lesson16 -draw an armored knight
  18. lesson 17 - Draw a fantasy dagger using the Five-S method
  19. lesson 18 - Creating space in your drawings - A Dragons Lair
  20. lesson 19 - Practice by drawing dragons
  21. Lesson 20 - Drawing from Memory
  22. Lesson 21 -Draw a Catapult
  23. Lesson 22: A Guest artist discusses pencils, his technique and building a library of images

Fantasy Art Lessons from Guest Artists

  1. How to draw a magical genie using Corel and Photoshop

 

Art Books & Supplies

  1. Art Kits
  2. Art Books
  3. Fantasy Art Books

 

OTHER PROJECTS

ArtWork Submitted by web visitors and web students - Submit your artwork and have it displayed here in the Fantasy Art School!

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Epic Fantasy.com
The Medieval Armory
THe Fantasy Guide
The Heroic Dreams Blog Knight-Medieval.com willkalif.com
make-video-games.com


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