There are about a billion ways to draw with a pencil. Which is great, right up until you sit down to actually draw something and realize you have no idea what you're doing.
So here are two pencil drawing techniques that are simple enough to remember and different enough to be worth knowing. One uses hard leads, crisp contours and directional hatching for a structured, graphic look. The other uses soft leads, broad shading and blending for something looser and more charcoal-like.
We're demonstrating both with Studio Pencils, our new pack of 60 pencil brushes for Procreate, Photoshop and Affinity. But the techniques themselves are universal. They work with a real pencil and a real piece of paper too, so don't trip if you haven't grabbed the pack.
In this tutorial:
How hard lead and soft lead pencils actually behave, and when to reach for each
The hard pencil workflow: contours, planes and directional hatching in four passes
The soft pencil workflow: shadow shapes, value build-up and light blending
How to combine both in one drawing
The mistakes that flatten a pencil drawing, and how to avoid them
Every pencil drawing technique on this page comes down to one decision: hard lead or soft lead.
Hard leads make light, thin, controlled marks. They hold an edge. They're for sketching, contours, line work and hatching. All your clean pencil stuff.
Soft leads are broader, darker and more textured. They're for shading, expressive marks and that softer graphite look you get when you stop trying to be precise.
Studio Pencils has 10 of each, which are the meat and potatoes of the pack. It also includes 10 hatchers for laying down directional strokes, 10 shaders for building larger areas of tone, 10 texture fillers for dropping in graphite grain without scribbling yourself into an early grave, 5 blenders and 5 erasers.
You don't need all of them in every drawing. Grab a few pencils you like, then bring in the specialty brushes when you actually need them. Keep it simple, stupid.
Really look at it. Not the "yeah, that's an orange" glance before you attack the canvas.
Look for the smaller shapes that make the subject unique. Pay attention to where forms overlap, where planes change direction, and what the outer edges are doing. You don't have to memorize every detail. You just have to figure out what makes this subject look like this subject before you start simplifying it.
Skip this and every technique below gets harder.
This is the structured one. Strong contours, clear planes, directional hatching, good contrast. Four passes.
Start with a rough pencil and break everything down into basic shapes. Don't worry about detail here. You're after proportion, placement and perspective.
Keep this pass light and loose. There is no prize for a beautiful rough sketch.
One thing that helps a ton: draw through the parts of the object you can't see. If one form sits behind another, sketch the whole thing as if the front object were transparent. It keeps everything fitting together and stops your perspective from getting wonky.
New layer, switch to a classic pencil.
Clean up the outside contours, simplify your construction lines, and pick out the bigger planes of each form. You are not mapping every microscopic surface change. Just the important stuff.
At the same time, lightly outline your major shadow shapes. That way, before you lay down a single hatch mark, you already know where the dark stuff goes instead of hatching and praying.
Keep the outside contours a little heavier than the interior lines. Nothing crazy. Just enough to make the silhouette read clearly.
Now you can throw some hatching on this thing.
Switch to a hard pencil and start with a light pass across all the darker planes. The big thing here is direction. As the surface changes direction, let your hatching change with it. One plane goes vertical, another diagonal, another wraps around a curve. Those small directional shifts do a surprising amount of work to make a form feel three-dimensional.
If you want to speedrun this, use hatcher brushes. They drop in a whole patch of clean pencil lines without you drawing every damn one. They follow the orientation of your canvas, so rotate your screen to change their direction, and change the spacing between lines by adjusting brush settings and dropping the grain scale.
For darker areas, go back to the hard pencil and either press harder or pack the lines closer together. A few clear groups of hatching beats a hundred scattered ones.
Last pass is just pushing what you already have.
Go over the darkest areas with more pressure. Tighten up the hatching. Add cross hatching where you really want the value to drop.
Cross hatching is just a second layer of hatching running at an angle across the first. Each additional layer darkens the area and tightens the texture. You don't have to cross hatch everything. Some artists cross hatch the entire drawing, some use it only in the deepest shadows. Both are correct. We're not the pencil police.
Then strengthen a few contour lines where forms overlap or need separation. This is usually the moment the drawing stops looking half finished.
If it still feels too clean or sparse, add a texture filler on a new layer set to multiply, brush in a little extra graphite, then adjust the layer opacity and erase a few highlights back in.
That's the whole hard pencil technique. Four passes, clean structure, strong contrast, done.
Now loosen up. Instead of building the drawing out of crisp contours and organized hatching, this one is about big shapes of light and dark. It gets you closer to charcoal or Conté.
Block in your basic shapes again, this time with a powder pencil, and keep things messy. These lines are going to disappear into the shading anyway, so you're just checking proportion and placement.
If you have a hard time sketching lightly, lower your brush opacity. It stops you from putting down something aggressively dark five seconds in.
Grab a dusty pencil and loosely block in your main shadow shapes. Broad, messy marks are fine. You are establishing the big light and dark pattern, not perfect coverage.
Let your strokes follow the general direction of the form, but let everything feel more organic than the hard pencil version.
Do not blend yet. If you start blending before you've built up any graphite, you're just smearing around nothing. Get some meat on the bones first.
Also keep your pencil selection tight. There are 20 pencils in the pack, but your drawing does not need all 20 brushes fighting each other in a Walmart parking lot. Pick one to three that work well together and stay there.
Now build the darker values. More strokes, more pressure, more graphite where you need depth.
The main thing is: do not make every shadow equal. You want some light grays, some medium grays, and a few areas that go really dark. Save the darkest spots for where forms overlap, turn away from the light, or need separation.
Otherwise everything turns into one big gray blob, and nobody wants a gray blob.
For deep shadows, make a new layer, set it to multiply, and build extra graphite there.
Once you like your values, bring in shaders to build broader areas of tone without scribbling over the same spot a hundred times. You aren't trying to bury the pencil texture you already put down. You're connecting values and giving the larger shadow areas more weight.
Then hit a few transitions with a blender. Lightly. If you blend everything into one perfectly smooth gradient, congratulations, you just used an airbrush. Leave most of the pencil texture in there.
Push a few of your darkest areas, then pull highlights back out with an eraser. Don't overdo it. A couple of bright accents against dark values goes a long way.
If you want to push the charcoal look further, add a very small amount of Gaussian blur at the end. Small. Tiny.
Same subject, same pack, completely different drawing.
Nothing says you have to pick one.
A common approach is to build structure with the hard pencil workflow, get your contours and planes locked in, then switch to soft leads to lay tone into the shadow shapes you already mapped. You get the accuracy of the first technique and the atmosphere of the second.
Mix them however you want.
What is hatching in art? Hatching is a shading technique that builds value using parallel lines. The closer together the lines sit, the darker the area reads. It's one of the oldest ways to create tone in a drawing, and it works in pencil, pen, engraving and digital brushes alike.
What's the difference between hatching and cross hatching? Hatching uses one set of parallel lines. Cross hatching layers a second set of lines at an angle across the first. Each layer you add darkens the value and tightens the texture, so cross hatching is generally used for the deeper shadows in a drawing.
Should I use hard or soft pencils for shading? Soft leads for broad shading and expressive marks. Hard leads for controlled hatching and clean line work. Most finished drawings use both, with hard leads carrying the structure and soft leads carrying the tone.
What's the difference between graphite drawing and charcoal drawing? Graphite has a slight sheen, holds a fine edge and gives you tighter control. Charcoal is matte, much darker, and blends more readily. Digitally, soft lead pencil brushes with broad shading and light blending will get you very close to a charcoal or Conté look.
Can you get a real pencil look in digital art? Yes, if the brushes carry real grain and respond to pressure and tilt. The thing that usually gives digital pencil work away isn't the brush, it's the workflow. Building tone in layers, varying your stroke direction, and leaving texture unblended is what reads as graphite.
How do you avoid a flat pencil drawing? Vary your stroke direction with the form, keep a real range between your lightest and darkest values, and don't blend everything smooth. Contrast and texture are what create depth.
Studio Pencils is 60 pencil brushes built from real graphite scans: 10 hard leads, 10 soft leads, 10 hatchers, 10 shaders, 10 texture fillers, 5 blenders and 5 erasers, plus a 31 page user guide, a reference PDF and an interactive digital workbook.
Want more on value and light? Read our guide on how to shade drawings.
