10 Quick and Easy Sketch Tutorials by Lavi Arts (Step by Step)
Lavi Arts builds every sketch the same way: four panels, left to right, top to bottom. Panel one is a shape you could draw with your eyes shut, panel four is a finished drawing, and nothing between them gets skipped.
All ten drawings below are his, photographed from his own tutorials — not made by Pixelorbyt. We have added what each one is really teaching and where it gets hard.
If ten is not enough, this set of 23 easy step-by-step art projects follows the identical four-panel logic and is ordered easiest first, so you can keep going without hunting for the next step up.
For ten more sketches built the same way — hat, gown, panda, elephant — see this set of simple drawing tutorials for beginners.
For ten more of his four-panel builds — masked portraits, Spider-Man and two scenery pieces — work through these creative sketch tutorials for aspiring artists.
If you would rather draw to unwind than to improve, the same artist’s fun drawing tutorials for relaxation cover eleven short pencil pieces you can finish in about twenty minutes.
Seven more of his four-panel breakdowns, including the wide-brim hat and the closed-eye face, are collected in our easy drawing ideas round-up.
10 Quick and Easy Sketch Tutorials, Step by Step
1. Girl Resting Her Chin on Her Hand
Note the order — eyes, nose and lips go down before any hair, because hair drawn first crowds the features. The hand is the real work: those fingers curl back against the cheek, so you are drawing four foreshortened cylinders, not four lines. More faces in our female character sketch ideas.
2. Sunset Over Water From a Wooden Pier
Two straight lines and a railing bar carry the first panel. The difficulty lands in panel three, where the deck planks fan out to a vanishing point behind the sun. The values are inverted from what beginners expect: railing nearly black, water mid-grey, paper left white around the sun. Our printable sunset coloring pages help with the colour.
3. Half-Hidden Face Close-Up
One sweeping curve in panel one decides everything: the eyebrow, eye, nose and mouth are all placed relative to that hair edge rather than a centre line. Crop tight and let it run off all four sides. Most beginners make the hair too thin — it needs weight.
4. Boy Wearing a Face Mask
Two overlapping blobs for the hair and panel one is done. The mask is easier than a mouth but not free: the head turns three-quarters, so its top edge curves and a fold crosses the nose bridge. With the mouth hidden, the one visible eye carries the expression.
5. A Three-Storey House From Four Rectangles
Pure construction: two stacked boxes, then a pitched roof and balcony, then shrubs and poplars for scale. The railing is the trap — uneven uprights make the building read as crooked, so mark both ends, find the middle, then halve each gap. More in our simple house drawing ideas guide.
6. Road Running Into the Mountains
One-point perspective in casual clothes. Both road edges must meet at exactly the same point on the horizon; miss, and the road bends. Panel four is fast marks only — hatching on the peaks, flicked strokes for grass. More like it in our scenery drawing ideas for all levels.
7. Village Hut and Lotus Pond in Oil Pastel
The only fully coloured piece here. The line work stays simple — a hut, three overlapping hills, a lotus with ripple lines round the stem. Oil pastel goes light first, dark second: blend the orange banks with a fingertip, leave the blue water in visible strokes. That red lotus is the only warm accent below the horizon, which is why it pulls the eye. More outdoor subjects in our nature sketch ideas.
8. Front-Facing Girl With a Bob
Panel one is the hair as one closed shape, before a face exists inside it, which locks head proportion early. Front views punish asymmetry, so draw both eyes together, alternating, rather than finishing one and matching it. The near-black hair carries one soft highlight band across the crown — that band is what makes it read as glossy.
9. Waterfall Between Two Mountains
Two peaks, a horizon, then water dropping through the gap. Waterfalls are drawn subtractively: leave the paper untouched down the centre and darken the rock either side. Shading the water flattens the scene. The hut bottom-right exists purely for scale — cover it and the mountains stop looking big.
10. Girl in a Saree, Seen From Behind
The opening shape is not a body — it is the pallu falling from the shoulder, drawn as a long triangle, with the figure built inside it. Fabric is the lesson: long unbroken lines rather than short nervous ones, and pleat widths that vary so they do not look printed on. Pair it with our guide to drawing fabric texture.
How to Get the Most Out of a Four-Panel Tutorial
- Keep panel one absurdly light. Those first shapes are scaffolding, and a groove pressed into the paper never erases.
- Copy the order, not just the result. Features before hair, hair mass before strands, shape before detail — reordering is why a copy looks wrong even when every part is drawn well.
- Draw it three times. First pass for the sequence, second for proportion, third is the one you keep.
Between tutorials, our beginner-friendly drawing exercises are built to be repeated rather than finished.
FAQ
How long does one of these sketches take?
Panels one to three run 10 to 20 minutes. Shading stretches it, and the dark-haired portraits can reach an hour. Stopping at panel three is fine — a clean line drawing is a finished piece.
What pencils do I actually need?
An HB for construction and a 4B or 6B for the darks covers every drawing here, plus a kneaded eraser that lifts graphite without scrubbing the paper. Only the lotus pond needs more, and a starter box of pastels does it.
Why do my copies look wrong even when I follow every step?
Almost always the proportion set in panel one — a head shape slightly too narrow passes that error to every feature inside it. Hold the drawing to a mirror before adding detail; reversing it makes the mistake obvious.
Which of these should a complete beginner start with?
The house, the mountain road and the pier sunset — they lean on straight lines and simple perspective rather than anatomy. Save the front-facing bob for later; symmetry is harder than it looks. Our easy how-to-draw tutorials use the same format, one level easier.
Pick whichever drawing you keep scrolling back to and start there. A finished sketch does more for your motivation than a page of abandoned starts. For more of the same, work through our easy pencil drawing tutorials for beginners.
The full videos are on Lavi Arts’ channel at youtube.com/@drawingclassByLaviarts.
