Exercises to Increase your drawing skills, analysis and efficiency
Heya! Have you ever thought to warm up before drawing with seriousness? Or thinking about doing some good bunch of exercises to increase your drawing and analytical skills and efficiency to approach your reference images and drawings?
Below are some activities. Some help loosen up the hand, some sharpen the memory while others are to do with discipline and drawing regularly. Almost all put an emphasis on looking.
* Do a drawing from observation with your non-writing hand. As you have less control over this
hand you will be less able to draw what you think you should and more likely to draw what you
actually do see. Some believe this is because you are using a different side of your brain than
you usually do when drawing with your writing hand.
* For a similar lack of control, put your drawing implement (charcoal, pastel, chalk) on the end of
a long stick or a heavy object. The result will not be a neat, life-like drawing but it will have
qualities a controlled drawing lacks.
* Blind contour drawing is when you do not look at your paper at all. You keep your eye trained
on the object you are drawing and follow its contour, your pencil, charcoal etc never leaves the
paper. As you trace the outline of the object with your eye, your hand does the same on the
paper.
It can be interesting to impose restrictions on the way you draw.
*Take a large object and try and draw it and all its detail on a very small scale. Do the same with
a small object on a large scale. Is it frustrating to do? Does it change the way you look at the
object?
* It can be helpful and instructive to look at an object repeatedly to really get to know it to draw
it well. Take an object and draw it many, many times – from different angles, in different media,
to different scales. This will force you to look closely.
*Do an intricate drawing. Once completed spend 15 minutes or so exerting yourself physically –
running, dancing whatever. Come back to the drawing and try to replicate it twice the size while
your heart pounds. How easy is it to focus on the detail? How do the two drawings differ?
*Put some loud music on and draw. Do different beats and tempos affect the way you draw?
*Rumour has it that Whistler used to ask his students to observe a model on the ground floor of
their building and then rush up to the first floor where their easels were to paint it. They could
run back down to the model whenever they needed to but with practise the students were able
to keep the details in their mind’s eye for longer and longer periods. As they become more
proficient their easels would be moved higher and higher up the building until eventually they
were racing up six flights of stairs to work on their paintings. This may or may not be a myth but
does illustrate how the memory can be trained and fine tuned for the purpose of creating
accurate drawings. Could such an exercise be adapted to your circumstances?
*The best way to get really good at drawing is to make it part of your everyday life. Do a drawing
every day. A social media project called 28 Drawings Later took place in February 2012 to
encourage people to do just that. http://www.facebook.com/28DrawingsLater
* Set a timer and allow yourself to become absorbed in drawing. Turn off your phone and
eliminate all other distractions.
That's it. Thanks to read and I hope it illuminate the way you approach your drawing. Will see you in the next post.
Below are some activities. Some help loosen up the hand, some sharpen the memory while others are to do with discipline and drawing regularly. Almost all put an emphasis on looking.
* Do a drawing from observation with your non-writing hand. As you have less control over this
hand you will be less able to draw what you think you should and more likely to draw what you
actually do see. Some believe this is because you are using a different side of your brain than
you usually do when drawing with your writing hand.
* For a similar lack of control, put your drawing implement (charcoal, pastel, chalk) on the end of
a long stick or a heavy object. The result will not be a neat, life-like drawing but it will have
qualities a controlled drawing lacks.
* Blind contour drawing is when you do not look at your paper at all. You keep your eye trained
on the object you are drawing and follow its contour, your pencil, charcoal etc never leaves the
paper. As you trace the outline of the object with your eye, your hand does the same on the
paper.
It can be interesting to impose restrictions on the way you draw.
*Take a large object and try and draw it and all its detail on a very small scale. Do the same with
a small object on a large scale. Is it frustrating to do? Does it change the way you look at the
object?
* It can be helpful and instructive to look at an object repeatedly to really get to know it to draw
it well. Take an object and draw it many, many times – from different angles, in different media,
to different scales. This will force you to look closely.
*Do an intricate drawing. Once completed spend 15 minutes or so exerting yourself physically –
running, dancing whatever. Come back to the drawing and try to replicate it twice the size while
your heart pounds. How easy is it to focus on the detail? How do the two drawings differ?
*Put some loud music on and draw. Do different beats and tempos affect the way you draw?
*Rumour has it that Whistler used to ask his students to observe a model on the ground floor of
their building and then rush up to the first floor where their easels were to paint it. They could
run back down to the model whenever they needed to but with practise the students were able
to keep the details in their mind’s eye for longer and longer periods. As they become more
proficient their easels would be moved higher and higher up the building until eventually they
were racing up six flights of stairs to work on their paintings. This may or may not be a myth but
does illustrate how the memory can be trained and fine tuned for the purpose of creating
accurate drawings. Could such an exercise be adapted to your circumstances?
*The best way to get really good at drawing is to make it part of your everyday life. Do a drawing
every day. A social media project called 28 Drawings Later took place in February 2012 to
encourage people to do just that. http://www.facebook.com/28DrawingsLater
* Set a timer and allow yourself to become absorbed in drawing. Turn off your phone and
eliminate all other distractions.
That's it. Thanks to read and I hope it illuminate the way you approach your drawing. Will see you in the next post.
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