Updated on by Rita Moreira
Who writes the articles on this blog
Every article on Desenhos Realistas is written by Rita Moreira, a realistic pencil drawing teacher. She teaches by drawing, and it shows: she writes about the graphite that saturates too soon, the blending that muddies the paper and the mistake almost everyone makes at the same point in a portrait.
Rita reviewed and updated the 217 Portuguese articles on the blog and wrote the ebook series published here. The blog exists in five languages (Portuguese, Spanish, English, German and Italian) and the byline is the same in all of them, because it is the same teacher.
How an article is made here
No article starts with the writing. Research comes first, and the research decides what the piece has to answer and in what order.
- Research into the real questions. We look at what people in that country actually type and ask about the subject, using local search suggestions and the questions raised by the pages that already answer the topic well.
- A brief agreed before writing. The title, the sections, the frequently asked questions and the target length are settled in writing before a single paragraph exists. The writer never improvises the structure.
- Writing from the brief. The text grows out of the brief, never from another article sitting open beside it to be turned over word by word. Machine translation plays no part at any stage.
- Review with a minimum score. Each article goes through an automated check (title and description length, required blocks, internal links) and an editorial review scored from 0 to 100. Anything below 90 goes back for correction.
- Publication and verification. Once live, we check the page itself: correct language, the other language versions properly linked to each other, and the article present in the site map.
It is a deliberately slow process. It exists so that an article only reaches you after passing checks that do not depend on anyone simply feeling it turned out well.
Why the English version is not a translation
Each language on this blog is written from scratch for its own reader. We call it transcreation: the knowledge behind the original article is kept, but the text is new, with the terms used here, the examples that mean something here and art shops you can genuinely walk into.
That changes more than you would expect. The same subject can become an article with a different running order, a different title and different frequently asked questions, because the worries of someone learning to draw are not identical everywhere.
What never changes is who is teaching. Rita is one person across all five versions: we adapt examples, materials and references, never her biography.
What happens when we find a mistake
It happens, and it happens precisely because we research. While preparing an article for another language, the research often reveals that something published long ago in the original text is inaccurate.
When that occurs, the older article is corrected and the correction is recorded in our internal documentation, with the date and the reason. Fixing it quietly would be easier and less honest.
Where the drawings illustrating the articles come from
The illustrations are not generic stock images. They are real drawings, made by readers in our community and sent in by them, catalogued in a gallery of 545 works.
Whenever we know who drew a piece, the credit is shown. If an image is not a community drawing, the page says so.
How we flag affiliate links
Some articles discuss materials: pencils, papers, rubbers, blending stumps. Where a link to buy that material is an affiliate link, the notice appears above it, on the same page, in the language you are reading.
The recommendation comes before the shop, never the other way round. If a material is wrong for what the article teaches, the article says so.
What you will not find here
We do not publish numbers we have not measured. No counters of testing hours, no “trusted by thousands of students”, no percentages invented to sound scientific.
Where a reliable figure exists, it comes with its source and its year. Where it does not, the sentence is written without a number, qualitatively and truthfully: an honest comparison is worth more than a tidy statistic that is false.
How to reach us
If you have spotted an error, disagree with a recommendation or want to send one of your own drawings to the gallery, write to us through the contact page. An error reported by a reader is taken seriously and joins the same correction queue described above.