A rock is a solid organic form consists of minerals. Throughout the history massive pieces on earth got heated, squeezed, weathered and caused smaller ones. That is an interesting fact that humanity has learnt a lot from those pieces about creatures (like dinosaurs) have existed once. I found an article about it and I am dropping its link in the end.

What I like about preparing those tutorials is that I google more than I’ve done before Stretched Paw and I discover new things, like I found out Pancake Rock’s existence (which was previous post’s topic) while looking stuff for rocks. You can go out and look around to have a rock to draw or google. I did google.

Let’s start drawing.
Here I have something very simple (simple drawing, strong message, haha):

Basicly they are like ovals almost (or similar potatoes’ outlines) and now we are going to create an illusion with cracks, shadings (according to where the light doesn’t fall or falls less), some textures and break the flat view of that plain oval.

I drew contours more or less the same to show you how to make different look by different drawing techniques. If we simply say that drawing a thing on paper is an illusion, to me nature drawing is just scribbling.

Now imagine a cube, or let’s say a dice: there are 6 flat surfaces. When you consider a rock you will see an organic form which contains irregular changeful surfaces. Those surfaces are not flat, probably not smooth and/or have texture on them (like lines, dots, stains).

I used HB pencil for contours and general construction, then 2B charcoal pencil to indicate cracks and 6B charcoal pencil to darken some parts of those cracks to give depth effect. At some parts there can be cracks, scratches, maybe moss (if you think that rocks are under rain, storm, by shores, that natural facts cause them shaping).

Here they are one by one:

I used charcoal pencils in here to darken where light doesn’t fall; charcoal leaves good marks for an organic look. I strongly advice for you to use charcoal, you will have better results than sketching pencils.

Cracks with charcoal pencils

Light lines

On the front side there is a big deep crack. On the front side there are tones of black charcoal, which means the surface is not flat.

That one has horizontal lines, they are partly dense and not perfectly straight.
In the middle down part there is a small cave, there is darker.

Simple cracks, the biggest/deepest crack is the one in the middle like ‘Y’ (‘Y’ in the wind 😛 ) it has darker lines.

Here I have a work of a massive rock texture:

You can google big rock/massive rock to have a reference for your drawing. But you should remember that working on such topic needs to free your mind and hand a little bit. Also keep that on mind that If you will draw veeery slow, drawing will be an uneasy process and I don’t think that you will enjoy it like that; so make your hands work faster than your worrying brain (they worry in case of overthinking, better get to work).

I also have thought that these kind of crowded -or let’s say detailed- drawings are suitable to hide some symbols, figures or scenes whatever (I haven’t done in here anyway)

A cut from the texture. There are stains partly, makes me think of dalmatians-I could have hidden one, alas!

That is an interesting topic. I would be glad to see what you have done, or write me if you want to add something about the topic.

See you in the next post.
Happy sketching!

The article I told about:
http://www.rocksandminerals4u.com/what_is_a_rock.html