By Sophia B., 3rd Grade
If you want to know how to draw interesting and strange things, this is for you. Enjoy!

I have been drawing interesting and strange things for about 5-6 months. I am a former manga (anime) artist. Well, not entirely former. I still draw manga a little bit these days, but mostly strange things.

If you don’t know what to draw to get started with, I have a list so that you won’t get frustrated.

  • Flying cars
  • Any kind of robot
  • Mist
  • Eyes
  • Monsters
  • Machines
  • Desired inventions
  • Mysterious buildings
  • Strange animals
  • Cliffs
  • Caverns
  • Crystals
  • Scenes in wildlife that don’t bore you to death
  • Skulls
  • Skeletons
  • Wolves
  • Dragons
  • Bugs of all types
  • Trees
  • Ghost towns

So, if you’ve chosen what to draw, now we should move to the next step. Make a mental picture of what you want your drawing to look like. When you draw, use a pencil, not colored pencils, just a regular pencil that you would use for a math test. Don’t use anything else for this except for charcoal. Scrape lightly against the paper when you sketch, and after you’re done, the pencil you’re using should be dull, and since that event is ranked high in probability you should smooth and round out your shapes and lines. Make things complicated, Instead of putting things into one big shape, break it into lots of small, detailed pieces. Do not color the drawing because it will ruin how intense your art is. Shade it in with shades of gray and black.

That’s just the general stuff. Now what we need to focus on is drawing different materials and shapes. But before we move on, there’s something very important to art that you should know: The only rule of art is that you cannot make any rules. With art, there’s no right or wrong way to do it. You should choose to do your art the way you want it, and nobody should tell you you’re not right or that you need to change it or do it a different way. You’re the artist, and you get to do what you want with your art. When I say don’t do this thing or do this, I’m trying to give you tips and pointers to things that are good in my opinion. So, anyway, let’s get moving.

METAL – With metal, it’s a good idea to show a smooth texture. Sometimes, you can’t really figure out how to do texture, so I’ll give you some tips on that. To show smooth texture, stroke your pencil in one direction. Even if you come to a break or a branch-out in your drawing keep shading in the same direction. A good angle to stroke your pencil at is a diagonal direction. Sometimes, if the drawing calls for it, show little nails, bolts, or screws. Make pieces of metal stick out, jagged and sharp. Add layers to the metal like the suit of armor on a pill-bug.

GROUND – When you draw ground, it’s best not to use a ruler. Add occasional cracks and bumps to the ground to give a much more realistic appearance. Show sprouts and seedlings amongst larger plants. Scatter and scribble for out of control grasses and leaves.

FUR – Drawing fur and hair is a bit challenging. To make drawing this easier, you can draw the shape of your animal, and once you have your desired shape, in some certain places (it depends on where you want to do it) put some fur-like, curved spikes. Those spikes represent out of hand strands of fur.

BODIES – To draw great bodies, you must draw the different body parts in correct proportion of the rest of the body. When you draw legs and arms start by making the arms fairly thick, and when you go further down, start to round the arms slightly inward. About halfway down the arm, go again as you did before, thicken the arms (less so than before.) Quickly change as you get to the wrist, making it less muscular and more straight than the rest of the arm. It’s all the same with your legs except that your legs are more muscular than your arms.

SPECIAL MARKER TECHNIQUE FOR ABSTRACT ART – I discovered that if you tap the edge of your marker against the paper (tap it so that the felt of you marker slimly misses the paper and the plastic comes down hard with a CLACK!) and the ink inside will spill out onto the paper. It doesn’t look like the regular marker line… it looks like splatters of paint. It’s 100 times cleaner than using paint. It’s best not to use Crayola markers because they don’t twist in your hand as much and they are very flat colors. So, if you want to try this, use interesting colored markers that are skinny.

GOOD-BYE! – That’s all I have for now, but I may write another article on art, since I love it so much. Sorry that I could not fit this all into the paper. I hope you enjoyed this because I have worked pretty hard on it and this is my first actually cool and well-written article. So now, what I was trying to get to in the first place…? .Good-Bye (or) The End.