Richly shadowed interiors lead to impressive drawings.
Room interiors are an aspect of everyday life and greatly vary between architecture, size, furnishings and colors. Drawing room interiors will quickly sharpen your drawing skills. They can be simple line drawings, richly shaded or in color. Since you are constantly surrounded by room interiors, you will always have fresh material. So the next time you enter a room, take out your sketchbook.
Perspective
One-point perspective can be helpful in learning more complicated perspective.
When starting out drawing interiors, studying perspective will greatly improve the believability of your drawings. The Internet offers many resources to learn perspective; for example, visit the website Drawing Coach. Start with what is called one-point perspective, due to its single vanishing point. Once you have conquered it, graduate to two- and three-point perspective. Create simple interiors from your imagination. After you get a good sense for space, you will be able to draw rooms from life, called observational drawing. Once you understand spatial relationships, you will not have to use a ruler to locate your vanishing points when drawing a room from life.
Shading
Line drawings look simple, but will teach you a lot.
With a knowledge of space, you can explore many different types of observational drawing. Start with simple line drawings, in pencil. This will allow you to get comfortable with size relationships of the room and furnishings. Shading your drawing will make it look more "real." Soft charcoal along with a charcoal pencil are good for the beginner, because you can easily cover large areas and erase if you make a mistake or want to add a highlight. If you feel more comfortable sticking with your graphite pencil, crosshatch to add your shading. This technique uses small lines placed closely together. To get an area darker, you will add lines in the opposite direction, building the graphite slowly up to the shade you want.
Color
Chalk pastels create an infinite number of colors when crosshatched.
With a knowledge of space and shading, you can begin to add color to your interiors. Start with a limited palette, so you do not get overwhelmed by your color choices. If you were more comfortable with the graphite pencil, use colored pencil or hard pastels. If the charcoal was easier for you, try soft or chalk pastels. All media can be built up using crosshatching, allowing one color to show through the color hatched on top.
