Confident Drawing: Tips and Exercises to Train Your Drawing Hand

1. Intro: Hey, there. Welcome to Confident drawing Exercises to Trainer Drawing Hand, a class for beginner artists and designers. My name is Emma Get, and I am a full time professional illustrator with experience in the publishing and animation industries. I've been working as an illustrator for five years, and my clients have included Disney, random Penguin House, and American Girl among many others. I have classes for beginner and intermediate artists looking to level up their character design and illustration skills. For some artists that are just starting out in their journey, the biggest hurdle to them drawing confidently is getting their hand to do what the brain wants it to do. If you're a new artist and you find that, you have a difficult time getting what's in your head onto paper. Feel awkward holding a pencil or can only manage to draw weird, feathery or wobbly lines while drawing. Then this is the class for you. Strengthening the connection between your drawing hand and your brain is the very first step every artist should take. And learning to make confident bold lines will take your drawings to a whole new level. In this short class, I'll be sharing with you three tips to improve your technique and three exercises that you can use to help you become a more confident drawer. So without any further ado, let's jump into this class. 2. 3 Tips/Techniques: So without any further ado, let's jump into my first hip. My first tip is to draw in as few strokes as possible. A sign of an inexperienced drawer is someone who uses feathery or really light lines. This happens when an artist feels really inconfident in their ability to hold the pencil or get down the strokes that they see in their heads. They make really short feathery lines instead of just drawing the line out right. It may feel safer or more comfortable to draw this by when you're first starting out. But the sooner that you can commit to drawing in as few strokes as possible, the sooner that you can train your drawing hand to move with more confidence and accuracy. What's the difference between me drawing with many strokes versus few strokes? My second tip for you is to ghost your strokes, which is a practice in visualization. As you watched me draw the second pass, you may have noticed that I made a lot of extra movement over the paper before placing my marks. This is called ghosting. This is a practice in visualization and helps you to strengthen the connection between your drawing hand and your brain. Instead of slowly building out an arc with small feathery strokes, visualize the arc that you want to draw, and ghost your hand over that imagined arc as many times as you need until you feel like you know what the motion feels like. They make your mark. Notice how different the impact is between these two lines. This one is bold and makes a statement where this one feels noncommittal and awkward. You can feel a whole page of marks that you've ghosted. The more you do it, the more confident you'll feel. My third technique for you is to draw from your shoulder. This is a figure drawing technique that adds a lot of flow and energy to your drawings. Your wrist only has so much range, but your shoulder has a really incredible range. Get out a piece of paper and attach it to a clip boarder book, rest it on your lap against the lip of a table so that it's facing you at an angle. Ghosting before you lay down your marks, start the motion in your shoulder and really try to limit movement in your wrist. Do you see the difference in the range of motion when I draw from my wrist and when I draw from my shoulder? If you're having a hard time keeping your wrist stabilized during this technique, then you might want to try another figure drawing technique where you hold the pencil under your hand and it's running parallel to your arm and you stabilize the tip between your point on your finger and your thumb. It's really hard to move your wrist in a comfortable way while doing this. It's a great way to get in the habit of only drawing from your shoulder. Drawing from your shoulder is perfect for sketching or getting loose gestural drawings. Or if you're feeling a little stiff or uninspired, it's a great way to break the mold and try something different. 3. 3 Exercises: Now that you've got these three techniques in your tool belt. Here are three exercises for you to warm up your drawing hand and strengthen that connection between your hand and your brain. The first exercise is to practice line weight. A big part of drawing is learning to use those strategically in a design. But before you can start making those design decisions, you need to gain the control in your hand to be able to make the transition from a thick to thin line. Fill a whole page in your sketchbook with lines that go from thin to thick and thick to thin. You can do short lines or long lines that facilate between thick and thin many times. You can try drawing a line at one thickness all the way through and then draw a line under that one that's slightly thicker and keep adding lines until you've created a gradient. This next exercise is great for practicing drawing from your shoulder. Fill an entire page in your sketchbook with circles. Big circles, small circles, ovals, or see if you can draw a perfect circle. This is an amazing warm up that even professionals use before sketching. If you want to have an extra challenge, try drawing a circle that starts thin and ends thick or starts thick and ends thin. The last exercise is to practice hatching. Fill an entire page of hatching and cross hatching. Try to draw them quickly and as parallel to each other as possible. You can try gradienting them by starting close together and gradually spacing them apart. You can play with line weight or try tilting your pencil to see what kind of effects you can get from your tool. This is a great way to improve your precision and efficiency. 4. Bonus Tip: Actually have one extra bonus tip for you. That is to protect your hand from drawing injuries and to stretch it after you've been doing a lot of drawing. You can stretch your hand by turning your palm up and with the other hand pulling the fingers down toward you. Then you can turn your palm to face the wall in front of you and with your hand pull your fingers back towards you. Carpal tunnel and hand injuries are no fun, so you want to make sure that you've got great hand health for the journey ahead of you. 5. Final Thoughts: Well, that's it for this class. Your project is to fill three sketchbook pages using the tips and techniques that they shared with you. Take pictures of what you draw and share them in the projects tab below, and also tell me what you want to learn to draw the most. Then check out my character design for beginners series. It's full of design and drawing tips that are great for beginners. If you like this class, leave a review, this helps my class get in front of other students. Follow me here on skill share so that you get notified of future classes, and if you're interested in seeing my work, you can follow me on Instagram at Emma Gillett Art, or you can also sign up for my newsletter to stay on top of what's going on with my professional work. Thanks again and happy drawing.