Car Design Sketches – Working with Line Weight

There are so many skills that have to be mastered when learning how to draw cars and if you are ever going to make it as a professional car designer. In our last 2 How To Draw Cars videos, the goal was to get to the essence of what makes car design sketches look professional vs. car design sketches that look amateurish.

The look of your car design sketches is the proof that you are getting better. The goal should always be to move your skills forward. If you want to apply to a top design school or go for a scholarship, the more advanced your skills are, the better your chances are of success. This success will come the more accurately and passionately you can showcase your design ideas through your finished drawings and concept sketches. It’s that simple.

Our last 2 videos have been receiving a very positive response. I hope that they are helping everyone who has watched them. A couple of new students have signed up for the How to Draw Cars program recently. With this, I noticed a particular trend.

What’s the Best Way to Do Car Design Sketches?

When some of the students were sketching speed forms and trying to learn to draw from their shoulder, the weight of their lines, of the actual marks they were making on the paper were all the same. The thickness of the lines were not varied which is usually the result of drawing from your shoulder.

Some of this could be the result of using fine art pencils vs. a soft leaded colored pencil as prescribed and shown in the videos. The soft lead of the colored pencils like Prismacolor Premiere actually teach you to go easy when you first start sketching. If you don’t, the lead gets very dull very fast and your initial “thinking” lines will be much too dark as the drawing progresses.

This is why these pencils are recommended. I do understand that they might not be available in every location around the world. Use what you can get your hands on. The lead should be very soft, almost crayon like, with a rich waxy texture. Some colored pencils have a very hard lead and do not work well for learning to sketch cars in the manner I am trying to suggest.

I went back and looked at the work that was submitted by the new students with their applications to our program. In their sketches, all the lines were the same weight. The new sketches they were sending me over Skype to show me their progress also had a single or near single line weight. Hummm.

As someone who struggled with all of this myself, I know that there is not a single thing in the pursuit of getting better at sketching cars that you can master in one day or even a week. There is no magic download program like in movie The Matrix. Where you can learn a complex skill in a matter of seconds. All of the techniques unitized by car designers take hundreds of hours to get better at and thousands of hours to master.

As I have said before, drawing cars is hard. Drawing cars of your own design is infinitely harder still. Once you realize this you can get on with the business of improving your skills. You know and accept that you need to put in the hours, do the mileage, make a commitment and let your passion drive you. This is not going to happen in an afternoon.

Reviewing all the student work, I thought long and hard about the idea of line weight. What might be holding someone back from changing how they sketch? Could you teach someone to make sure they started out with light lines? Then gradually build up key areas of their design drawing as you went along?

The goal of varying your line weight is to emphasize certain parts of your drawing, to call attention to one area over another. This worked for the masters during the Renaissance and it will work for you today. It also allows for the structure of your drawing, all the lightweight “thinking” lines put in early in the process, to remain visible. This adds texture, depth and interest to your car design sketches. It also shows you’re thinking. And that you understand that what you are tying to represent is a three dimensional object in space.

Should Every Line Be the Same Weight?

Creating these types of layers in car design sketches, with nuance and depth in the line work, can only happen once you are aware that you have options. If no one ever holds up a sign that says, “Not every line has to have the same weight or thickness”, you might never realize it. So I’m holding up that sign.

Not every line in your car design sketches has to have, nor should it have, the same weight or thickness. In fact, if you want to make sure your sketches are rich, layered, textured and have the maximum visual interest, I would highly suggest you never do another car sketch with uniform line weight again.

Of course there are variations on this idea. A finished rendering will have many of the structure lines covered up with medium or erased in the pursuit of a presentation quality piece.  But even a finished presentation drawing can include varying line weights to add interest, depth and richness. All of these choices, what to leave in, what to take out, are based on your own individual aesthetic sensibilities which should develop to a professional level over time. And they will.

Express Your Passion Through Your Car Design Sketches

This is one of the reasons I wanted to start this tutoring service. Anyone interested in car design sketches is creating drawings that are “x” number of steps away from looking professional. You might be one session, one lesson, one suggestion away from admission to a top design college, masters program or full scholarship.

On the other side of the spectrum, your drawings may have more in common with the cars from the animated Pixar movie “Cars”. You want your car design drawings to look like they could have come out of a design studios of an auto manufacturer. While you may have the passion, your drawing technique needs work. The perspective is off. The surfaces are awkward. And maybe your line quality shows no variation whatsoever. The question then becomes, how good do you want to be? How quickly do you want to get there?

Your first step might be to pay some serious attention to the quality of your line work. Master drawing from your shoulder. Put in your structure lines lightly and build your drawings over the top of them. This will add depth and richness and show you’re thinking. You want your car design drawings to express your passion and your understanding of surface to the best of your ability. Not maximizing your line quality is trying to do this with your drawing hand tied behind your back. Focus on line quality and line weight.

If you have any questions regarding the information contained in this article, please leave them in the comments section below and we will get them answered. Thank you.