5 Unique Exercises For Drawing Better

1. Introduction: Do you want to improve your drawing and sketching skills? After learning basic techniques, practice is the only way you'll get better at it. This practice if done using variety of exercises gives results faster. My name is Mandarmat and I'm a fine artist and a sculptor. I do painting, sculptures and also teach art in my studio and in online classes. In this class about drawing exercises, I show you five unique exercises you can do to practice drawing. These exercises will help you improve your observation, improve eye hand coordination, reduce the fear of drawing and enable you to see like an artist using your right brain. This class is good for traditional artists, digital artists, illustrators, art design or architecture students, or even for those who like to draw just as a hobby. Enroll in this class and enhance your drawing practice by adding variety to it. I'm eager to see your drawings inside the class. 2. Drawing With Crayon: In this lecture, I'll show you another drawing exercise that makes you think and draw in terms of masses rather than lines. For that, I'm using a piece of tick Ron and I'm using it sideways so that I can get a broad stroke. For reference image, I'm using a website called artist pixelve.com. I've started drawing the torso first, which is the big shape, and then I'm going to add the limbs and the head. Rather than minute details, my focus here is to capture the overall pose correctly. Just like drawing with a brush, you might find this stuff in the beginning, but with practice, it'll get easier. Thinking in terms of masses and capturing them convincingly is an important skill in any form of drawing and painting. Now, it's your turn to draw a mask drawing like this. I'm eager to see your work in the project section. But 3. Drawing Upside Down: This lecture, we'll look at another drawing exercise that forces us to see in the way the artists see. The idea is to uncover the reference image slowly as you go on drawing what you see in the revealed portion of the image. The reference photo is also kept upside down so as to make it difficult for our left brain to recognize the object. The way to go about it is to not see the whole reference image in the beginning and to draw what you see in the revealed portion. You should look at the lines in the reference image to note their starting point, angle, and length. Then carefully draw these lines on the paper. Once all the visible lines are drawn, reveal some more portion of the reference image and draw the newly visible lines. Continue this process till complete image is revealed and drawn. Careful observation and drawing are right brain activities and hence, seeing the image partially and upside down forces left brain to suspend its interpretation of the image and allows right brain to do its work more properly. Hence, we tend to observe an unrecognized reference image more carefully and in turn draw it with more accuracy. It is like walking in the dark with a dim lantern in our hand one step at a time. People who consider that they are very bad at drawing are the ones who are amazed the most by the result of their upside down drawings. This exercise teaches us to observe details carefully and not to allow our preconceived notions about how a particular object looks like dictate what we actually draw. After all, a good drawing is a faithful copy of the thing being drawn. Now it's your turn to draw an upside down image. 4. Drawing With A Brush: Welcome to the lecture in which I'll be showing you how to practice drawing using a brush. Though I draw lines and then fill those in with black color, the emphasis is on drawing masses then the outlines. Use of a brush eliminates getting caught in the details and I can concentrate more on the overall shapes. Drawings done this way have a direct feel to them rather than the precise or articulated look of an academic drawing done with a pencil. This also helps you in loosening up and getting more expressive strokes over time. To start with, it's better to use reference images that are silhouettes. Here I'm drawing silhouettes of people in various positions. At first, this might be difficult but keep practicing and you'll get better at it very fast. Do not be too precise and slow with your brush, and don't be stressed up about the final product. What you will learn will be far more important than the drawing itself. As a variation, you could use a brush pen instead of a brush, but the tool is not more important than the approach of drawing masses rather than lines. Practice this regularly, and you will see the benefits. 5. Continuous Line: In this lecture, I'll be showing you a drawing exercise that's called continuous line exercise. In this exercise, the pencil or the pen is not to be lifted off of the paper until the drawing is complete. Obviously, it's okay to go over the lines which you have already drawn. The drawing that you create in this way is not going to look as good as a drawing made in normal fashion where you lift your hand and start another line where it's required. But this imperfection adds a unique character to the drawing and makes the drawing more interesting to look at. Benefits of this exercise are that it improves your eye and hand coordination. It trains your brain to observe details more carefully and makes you think more consciously about every line that you draw. Here I'm making a drawing of a Sadhu or a holy man from Varanasi, in which a monkey is sitting on the Sadhu shoulder. As you can see, I'm using thick and thin lines, and I'm doing that by wearing the pressure on the pencil. You can do this exercise with any mark making tools such as a pen or a pencil and as you don't expect a perfect drawing, there is less pressure on your mind and you can do this exercise just for the fun of it. You should do this exercise whenever you get few minutes of free time. Do it just as an exercise and do not worry about the resulting drawing. Real benefits of this exercise are improved observation and eye hand coordination. Go for it. 6. Drawing in Paper App: Here is another way you can practice drawing whenever you have very little time and just your iPhone or iPad with you. I'm using an app called paper by 53, and I'm yet to find the replacement for this application on Android. So for the moment, this type of drawing can be used only by people who have an I device. This is the application which is open in this part of the window. And here I have my photos open. So what I'll be doing is that in this application, there is a tool which looks like a paint roller. I'm going to use that to draw. And just to show you how it draws, if I want to draw a square with it, it goes like this. If I want to draw a letter C, I have to do it like this and then trace the outline of the letter, and that's the way it works. We might use the scissor tool sometimes. What this tool does is that I can simply cut some portion of this already present drawing out of it, and then I can just throw it away and you get this kind of shape. So this is a nice scissor. You can even create negative spaces with that. The way you get rid of the cut part is that you flick it outside the screen and it goes off. That's the way I'm going to use. Those are the two tools which I'm going to use to show you a way to practice drawings. This way of practicing drawing is I will help you see the big shapes, and it's a fun way of drawing something. I don't expect a perfect drawing with this, but then it gives you a different feel of the painting when you draw with this kind of tool, which you wouldn't get with a pencil or a pen or brush. So let's get started. I'm going to use let's first for the starters, let's draw some fruits. So the simplest one is an apple. So I'm going to sorry, I'm to use this tool. And so for the apple, I'm going to draw it like this. And this is the stem. This is the highlight which I'm trying to show on the fruit. Then if I want to draw a pair, I would start like this. And complete it here. If I have to draw a fig, I'll be starting like this and then go down and come up like this and end at the stem. If I have to draw a banana, it'll be something like this. This way of drawing makes you think of the shape very carefully. So first time you may not get clean shape as this, but that's the reason practice is there. So once you practice, you will be able to draw like this. Now if I want to draw something else, I'll take another page and let's draw a bird. I'm using this image from Pixabe which I've saved into my photos and I'm using that as the reference. If I can even change the colors in which I want to draw, I've chosen a yellow color. If I want to draw that, I'll start from the beak and then observe the head, how it goes, and then that's the back and these are some belly feathers, and here are the legs. And this is the chest of the bird, and then here is the beak, where it ends. It's not perfect. I would have liked the bird to have this width lesser than what it is right now, but it's just another way of drawing something. I could go in and use this scissor tool and cut some portion from the What happened? Let me undo. So I'm going to use the Cesar tool and cut some portion from the back of the bird. And to cut, you have to close the shape. Otherwise, it closes in a straight line. I'll show you what I mean by a straight line if I want to cut this portion and don't end it, then it'll close like this, which I don't want to happen. So it will be something like this, which I don't want to happen. So I'll just undo and then use this tool to just go in and close the shape here and throw it away. Still, it doesn't look like this bird, so I'm going to shave some part of the bird from here. It's like sculpting. But you get the idea how it will be. Now if I want to cut the eye, this is a graphic way of showing the bird, it's not how the bird looks actually. But this is a fun way of drawing something. Now let's move to another bird and take another page. Let me hide this start from the beak, then the head, and the wing and it has some feathers here, and then the tail starts and the body and it ends here. I'll indicate the legs here. This app has another feature in which you can overlap the drawing and it creates some different color because of the overlap. So that's the way this application works and you can see how we can use it to draw different things. Let's draw a person on another page. Let me hide this starting from the head. He goes like this in the shoulder in the hand and the foot. And the other leg and the other foot the dress from here, the other hand starts The shoulder and ends at the head. Now I want to get the white areas which are here and here. Now I can use the scissor tool and cut out these shapes. See how easy it is and it gives you a different kind of a drawing which you wouldn't have been able to do with a normal pencil. So now let's try a different approach. Let's add one more page to it. Let's go here. And then, one. Let's see I want let's draw this, but I'm going to draw this in a different approach. I'm going to I'm going to replicate something like a sculpture in which I remove the unwanted areas from the stone. This is the square or rectangle which I have with color. Now I'm going to use the scissor and then cut out whatever is not required. For example, I'm going to cut this and let me not go overboard and cut too much. I've cut that portion. Now I'm going to cut the negative shape. This is the head and the closing of the shape. And now I can come in and cut this portion. You can see that I've gone wrong with proportions. If the head is here, the body will end somewhere here and outside the device. So I don't want to continue like this. I'm going to cut this whole thing off or we can take another page. Let's add one more page here. Let's start again. Now let me use black color. I have this rectangle from which I'll be cutting. Just to take the proportions, this is where the legs will be and this is the hip. Let me first cut out the external shape on the left hand side. The hand, the torso, and here will be the leg. Let me cut this off first, and I'll do the same on the other side. And here I'm going to cut the space between her legs. The head. This is the outline for the hand and here goes the negative shape. I have a fairly okay drawing. I'm going to cut some more portion from here. And some more from here. Even the hand needs some repair work. But I won't go too much and try to adjust adjust this. I need some work here. Yeah, I'm happy with what I have. This is just a different way of drawing something. It's like, if you don't have this app, you can take a black paper and then try cutting out portions of paper which you don't want and you will end up with something like this. I hope you have enjoyed this different way of drawing. If I find an application on Android, which acts like this, then I'll surely update this lecture. But until then people with IDS can use this and see we started with drawing few fruits, then we drew this bird and this bird. This was a mistake. Then I drew this and finally this. Thank you for watching.