For centuries, artists have been sketching and drawing to put their ideas into illustrations in almost every line of work. Whether you are doodling on paper to memorize an important note or drafting a house for a new city-building project, our hands will never stop creating pictures from our minds.
In later years, beginner artists are unsure how to define the difference between sketching and drawing. We put together a visual guide to help you understand how these similar terms have separate concepts in the art world.
Sketching: Learning to Visualize Your Art
Sketching is the basic way for artists to observe and practice drawing the form of what’s in front of them or from their imagination. In short, sketching is used to draft objects to understand their form in different scenarios. It doesn’t matter what the object is as long as you practice until you can draw it naturally.
Using Stills
The basic function of sketching begins with anything standing still in its basic form or a still pose. Stills helps the artist draft objects using shapes and lines. The lines are used as a guide to help understand formation, depth, and symmetry. The shapes allow the artist to recreate the object in a simple illustration with no added details.
A perfect way to practice sketching stills is by using what’s lying in your home or the nature outside. Almost in any household, there are canned goods, a sports ball, and books to practice sketching basic 3-D geometry. The outdoors has rocks, trees, or potted plants that can teach you to recreate and understand rigid and curved structures.
Understanding Momentum
Sketching is also a great method to understand how objects move. In animation and graphic illustration, it’s essential for an action shot or something subtle, such as walking, to show movement. The easiest methods you can learn to recreate an object’s momentum are clothing, photos, and pausing on a frame of a show or movie.
Clothing will crease and fold to show and control the movement. Photos, when taken, will have nothing ever staying still in a busy environment, making them a fantastic tool for sketch references. Freeze-framing on a show or movie you love is useful for sketching dynamic poses.
Drawing: To Present An Idea Visually
Drawing is often confused with sketching because they both are defined to visualize a picture. The difference is drawing is used to present an idea rather than create. Using them in daily activities can help improve understanding of a concept.
Providing Visual Aid
There are reasons why school teachers, college professors, and work leaders in the work field use drawings. They provide a visual aid for students and employees to understand the idea they are teaching.
Take reading a traffic report. It’s difficult to read them when the results are shown as sentences. Instead, you highlight or underline what the results are. You organized the information into a bar graph or pie chart to see and understand the traffic report in a drawing.
Drawings are wonderful for children and teen books. They portray the author’s story to grasp their attention from the cover to the end of the book.
They are also helpful when giving instructions in manuals for someone performing a certain task for the first time. You know those fire extinguisher tags you see? They have step-by-step drawings next to their written instructions to show proper use.
Improve Memorization
Drawing is not only great for presenting an idea. It’s also useful to help people memorize certain things. According to a 2024 Learning Scientist study, pairing certain words with drawing can improve the person to identify their definition.
A famous example of drawings used as a study tool is animal behaviorist Dr. Temple Grandin. From birth, she faced the struggles of autism, which prevented her from studying tech engineering until she met her high school mentor, Mr. Carlock.
In the film of her first novel, Thinking in Pictures, Mr. Carlock went through Grandin’s subject notebooks, seeing she drew pictures with her notes. Before she met Mr. Carlock, she had trouble studying French as it was a requirement to graduate high school. She drew eels to remember pronunciations of the French words that sound similar to the fish’s name.
He took Grandin’s studying method to heart, not wanting her to change how she understood each subject. Mr. Carlock realized the fact when the death of her favorite horse, Chestnut had to be put down.
Special Thank You to Vitta Chin
I like to thank my younger sister, Vitta for providing me with her sketchbook. Ever since we were young, we have always put our creative input through art. If you want to see and support her artwork, her Instagram and Twitter is @vitta_chronicles where she posts sketches and animations.
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