Tips on Drawing Symmetry

I have a hard time drawing things perfectly symmetrical. I mean, really, who doesn’t? Drawing symmetry is tough! We’re not robots with mathematical precision. No worries, here are some quick tips that will surely help.

One trick that I picked up on is to draw half of your image, scan it in, duplicate it, flip and merge it together. It helps to draw a center line, so you know where the one half ends and the other will begin. Need the whole piece hand-drawn and inked? No problem! Just print it out an opaque version (of the whole image – two halves merged) and use that as the structure for your drawing. In fact, the legendary Jon Contino works this way. (I reached out to Jon over email about this, to which he graciously replied, resulting in us bonding over this mutual creative process.)

This approach is a “two birds with one stone” kind of thing. By duplicating, flipping and merging the one half, the whole drawing is completed! And it required only half the work! If you want to see more on how I use this method, check out this article I wrote about creating the WMC Fest 6 Poster.

Thanks for reading!