Tips 5) How much detail is too much? How much is enough?

When people comment on my sketches, they are more likely to comment on the amount of detail in them than anything else. There’s no doubt that I’m a novice when it comes to simplifying a scene to try to describe it accurately in as few lines as possible. When it comes to detail I often lay it on with a trowel. This is often not a conscious decision, it just happens when I make sketches. Sometimes I’m lucky enough that it works. Other times, not so much. 

Here’s a couple of sketches from 2017 where I think that the amount of detail works to the detriment of the overall picture.

This one I made in Alicante Airport. It’s not a very good rendition of the scene in the departure lounge because it’s far too busy, and there’s too much detail in the background, which distracts your eye away from the figures in the foreground, which should be what the sketch is all about. If I did it again, I’d pay  far more attention to the figures, and include more detail, and then just use some vague outlines with no shading at all for the background.

This one has the opposite problem. It shows the Charles Bridge in Prague, and it’s just not busy enough. It’s little more than an outline. There’s a very vague suggestion of some of the brickwork and some silhouette figures on the bridge. But that’s it. To be fair, it was a very cold day in Prague, and after the ten minutes or so it took to get this far, I was just frozen and my fingers were numb, so I stopped, and I never found the right time to go back and complete it.  

This is another one which is just too busy. This is the Domkirche, the Cathedral in Berlin. I caused my problems for myself by sketching it so large, which didn’t leave much room for anything else. If I’d had a smaller cathedral in the centre of the page, that would have given me more room to very lightly sketch in what was around it, which I think would have worked a lot better. 

Detail isn’t the be all and end all. Here’s the very first sketch I made with a specialist sketching pen.

When I made this sketch it was something of a eureka moment. To me, this isn’t at all detailed. There’s a lot of simplification gone on, and the shading isn’t very subtle. Yet when I look at it, I see St. Katherine’s Church. I even think the simplicity of the foliage in the background works. 

This is just my observation, but I think that the eye tends to be drawn to the areas of a sketch where there is the most detail. Now, there’s no rule that says that you have to try to make your reader focus on the dead centre of your sketch. You may want to offset the main focus towards the right, left, top, bottom. But if you have a very detailed area away from where you want the viewer to focus, it is going to drag their attention away. If you have competing areas of detail, this can make it difficult for the viewer to know where to look in order to ‘decode’ your sketch. So let me show you what I think is a far more successful ‘busy’ sketch. 

If you were to cut this vertically down the middle, then you’d see that there’s far more detail on the left half than the right. In fact your eye should be drawn to the most detailed area, the two figures in the foreground, and the bridal shop they are passing. This is because this is the ‘story’. The two people are my son in law and my daughter, who had just become engaged – it was serendipitous that we passed a bridal shop, and I asked them to walk past it a few times while I sketched their figures. Then I let them go, and I sketched in everything else. Your eye is led down the street by the way that the details on buildings and figures further along the street becomes less clear as you go further along the street. I wanted to show a glimpse of Cardiff Castle on the other side of the street, but kept the road blank, the trees in silhouette, and the castle with minimal shading so that they are never a distraction.

More traditionally, this next sketch places the centre of attention clearly in the centre of the page. This is Dylan Thomas’ Boathouse at Laugharne. The danger I found when sketching it was that the most detailed part of the sketch is actually on the bottom left hand where the wooden beams and railings are by the side of the house. This was in danger of pulling the viewers’ attention downwards, so I used quite heavy shading on the opposite side, and sketched in a lot more detail of the bushes around the bottom and the right hand side than I might otherwise have done, which balances the railings, and hopefully keeps the viewer’s main attention on the house. You might compare the bushes with the dearth of detail in the wall on the top right hand corner, and the sea and shoreline on the left. 

Both of these demonstrate that while you might not have much control over what elements have to be in your sketch, you do have choice over the amount of detail that you use. You can get surprisingly good effects by combining very detailed areas, with areas which aren’t more than outlines. 

* When you’re in the early stages of making your sketch, look at the scene you’re sketching, and think carefully about the areas which need more detail, and those which would be better sketched in more lightly. Too much detail can be confusing to the viewer, too little can also be confusing, and may not engage the viewer’s interest.

The last sketch is one where I feel that I got the balance right. The most detailed area of the sketch is the Altes Museum entrance in the background. Everything else becomes lighter as you move closer to the reader, and further towards both edges of the sketch. The tree trunk on the right, for example, is hardly there at all.