Browse our collection of realistic drawings for sale online today. Our selection of drawings showcase work from artists worldwide. Ranging from portraits, to cityscapes, our gallery offers original realistic drawings available to purchase online.
Not sure where to start? Take a look the work of award winning Nigerian artist, Fatola Israel. Fatola creates hyper-realistic drawings of people and animals and can be found in galleries, and embassies around Lagos and Nigeria. His reason for practicing art is to communicate his thoughts and ideas and to portray humans as products of their societies by focusing on their struggles and experiences.
Characteristics and Influences of Realistic Drawing
Realistic drawings are types of drawing that are heavily influenced by the widespread art movement – realism. Realism is characterised by drawing or painting that depicts its subject on a spectrum of reality. One the one end realist artists aim to depict the world in a natural way, and on the other, there are artists who try to depict their subject matter that can only be described as hyperreal. Like photographers driven by capturing what cannot be seen with the eye, hyperreal artists try to depict what cannot be captured by a camera.
Realistic drawings and realism developed out of the naturalist movement. Artists started focusing on subject matter that didn’t allow their work to qualify as high art at the time. Subjects included scenes of peasants and working class life. These drawings shocked the upper classes who were used to the depiction of wealth and extravagance in high art.
Realistic drawings can be thought of, either as a style in which artists create hyperreal, almost photographic drawings, or as subject matter where scenes of everyday life are captured in a natural way.
Famous Artists Creating Realistic Drawings
Famous for his realistic drawings is French Artist Edgar Degas who depicted scenes of modern French society. His preferred subject matter was ballet dancers and people in urban cafes. During his earlier career Degas painted portraits of individuals and groups. These paintings not only showed his interest in the tension between men and women, but signs of the style he would develop later in his career by cropping subjects awkwardly and choosing unusual viewpoints.
A collector of Japanese paintings, he was influenced by eastern imagery and abstracted inventive compositions and novel points of view from them to use in his own compositions. These compositions also influenced the way he painted and how he made his sculptures. Like many realistic artists he had a scientific interest in his subjects, which he sketched first, as a means of studying them, then sculpted or painted in oil later.
Known for his impeccable realism, Kelvin Okafor’s drawings capture the likeness of his subjects with such precision that they are often mistaken for photographs. His commitment to precision is so absolute that his drawing of John Lennon (2019) famously took more than 215 hours to complete. The artist states that to achieve this realism he “visually dissects” each subject’s facial features – studying them and then drawing them in stages – putting them back together like pieces of a puzzle.
Find out more in our Guide To Drawings.
