Improve Your Drawing For Good - A 10-Day Drawing Challenge to Train Muscles And Brain

1. Intro: Are you struggling with your drawing skills? Have you ever said things like I can't draw. I'm not an artist. Practicing is boring. Don't feel confident. I don't have talent. I have heard many amateurs and even seasoned artists saying things like that. And I was one of them. But let me tell you, none of it is. Drawing is a skill anyone can master. You just need to know how. Hi. My name is utah Schneider. I'm an artist and educator based in Germany. This class will help you advance in your drawing skills while enjoying the process. We will talk about brain functions and how we can use them to our advantage. My ten day drawing challenge will help you establish a new practicing habit. The drawing proms are digestible and repeatable and will train both your drawing muscles and your brain in the best possible way. You can follow along using the workbook I have created for this class. Use it together with my brush set in procreate or in the traditional way printed out with pen or pencil. Once the ten days are over, you will see a huge improvement in your drawing skills. You will have learned how you can motivate yourself, and you will have a toolbox full of extremely beneficial drawing exercises. This way, you will become a better artist every day while feeling great. So are you ready to improve your drawing for good? Then let's get started. I will see you in class. 2. Class Project: Class projects help you reinforce what you've learned by applying it in a practical way. It's one thing to understand concepts in theory, but putting them into practice makes the knowledge stick. One of the goals of this class is to establish a practicing habit in your daily routine. That's why I created this ten day drawing challenge. Your class project is going to look like this. First, you download the workbook, and if you're planning to work in procreate, my hand crafted procreate brush set as well. You can find them in the resources tab. In my workbook, you will find a progress tracker to help you visualize your progress and stay accountable. Start with watching Day ones Exercise video and follow along in your workbook. Tick off the box on your progress tracker, then take photos or export from Procreate. Now, you can create a new project in the project and resources tab. Upload your photos or JPEx there, and feel free to share any thoughts with us. Then it's time to celebrate your first achievement. Please look at your Peers class projects as well and cheer them on. We all appreciate some praise. Tomorrow, you will come back and complete the second day's exercise and upload your project as well as your progress tracker. Continue the following days with the same process. Watch the video, complete the exercise, take some photos, and your project. This will keep you accountable, and it will help you establish your new habit, as well as staying motivated. I can't wait to see your projects and the progress in your skills. Let's move on for now to the next lesson where we talk about the materials you'll need for this class. I will see you there. 3. Material: You really don't need much to follow along with my ten day drawing challenge. If you are a digital artist and like to use procreate, that's fine. In my brush set, you will find everything you need. If you prefer to draw on paper, simply print out the workbook and use it with a pencil or pen. You can even follow along when you don't have access to a printer. In that case, you just need a sketchbook or plain paper. If you wonder what pens I recommend having, it's those five. A technical pencil represented in my appropriate brush set by the sketcher tag. A HB pencil, in my brush set, it's called sketcher HB, a six B pencil, called sketcher six B in my brush set, a fine liner. The equivalent in procreate would be my nice liner fine. Add a calligraphy pen, which is represented by the nice liner jacket in my brush set. But again, you can follow along with this class by using a simple HB pencil only. That's no problem at all. In my workbook, you will find a page dedicated to each day of the ten day drawing challenge. When you watch the given day's lesson, you will hear how I approach the exercise, my pen recommendation, and you will see how I tackle the practice. Sometimes I will give you additional exercises at the end of a lesson. In that case, you might need an additional sheet of, more pages in your sketch, or when you work in Procreate, you can simply add new layers and draw there. In general, you can spend as much time as you want for each practice, but make sure you schedule a minimum of 10 minutes daily for your practice. Let's move on in class now and have a bit of an insight into our brains architecture. I will see you there. 4. How Our Brain Works: Un. Are you ready to rewire your brain and change your thinking? Then let's start by having a look at how our brain works. Here's a simplified image of our brain. There is the left hemisphere and here's the right. The left hemisphere is the logical and analyzing side. Whereas the right one is more associated with creativity and intuition. When we look at the left sides tasks, we can tell that these are all skills that are highly nurtured in school and modern society. That makes our left hemisphere quite dominant. We can also say that making art, like drawing, painting, or any other creative process are probably part of the right hemisphere's duties. Our goal should be to keep both halves of our brain in balance and use the appropriate side for a given task. We have already learned that the left part is quite dominant, as it is well trained by the school system and societal values. But how do you train the right side of the brain? Well, simply by taking away some of the dominance of its left counterpart. The reason we often claim we can't draw is because we use the wrong side of our brain for this task. In childhood, we memorize simplified images of everything around us. Storing informations as simplified symbols makes it easier for our brain. It works faster. Let's prove it. Pause this video and take a piece of paper and a pen. Now draw a simple flower just from memory. Then come back to this lesson. If your flower looks somehow like this, then it's because your left brain side took over. I just drew a symbol of a flower, and yes, it looks childish and not really realistic. It is what my brain stored back then. And it's pretty quick in referring back to it when I think of a flower. This happens with basically anything we want to draw. We draw from memory instead of what we see. It's not. Let me repeat that. It's not because we can't do any better. But because the left brain pushs forward and takes away the duties of the right brain hemisphere. Nothing's wrong with our drawing ability. In the upcoming exercises, I will show you ways to push back this cheeky left brain side, and that's already enough to help our creative side to do its job. We will learn to observe and focus on what we actually see to stop our brain from referring back to symbols. And here, step one of rewiring our brain is complete. In our next lesson, we will move on to Step two, where we will talk about motivation and what it takes to actually enjoy or even get addicted to a necessary chore. Stay tuned, I will see you there. 5. The Secret to Motivation: In this lesson, we will talk about motivation. How can we cultivate it? What does setting achievable goals have to do with it? And how can a ten day drawing challenge help you? It's clear to improve your drawing skills, you have to practice regularly. To be honest, sitting down to practice day does so intimidating. Wouldn't it be great if we could find a way to happily draw every day and improve with ease. Let me show you how you can get there by using your own body and setting smart goals. Let's start with picturing a moment where you have finished a task. Let it be housework, writing a paper, a workbook, or whatever else comes to mind. You're finally done, and you feel good. The achievement lifts your spirit due to a certain hormone called dopamine, also known as the happiness hormone. Dopamine is a neurotransmitter, a messenger in our brain. It's released where we experience something enjoyable or rewarding, such as eating good food or receiving praise. Brain scientists found out where we engage in activities that result in a positive outcome, Dopamine is released, creating a feeling of pleasure and reinforcing the behavior that led to the reward. This reinforcement strengthens our motivation to repeat the behavior in the future. Dopamine is also involved in anticipation. When we anticipate a reward, such as the satisfaction of completing a task or achieving a goal, dopamine levels increase, driving us to pursue that reward through goal directed behavior. This leads us to the necessity of setting smart goals to fully use the benefit of DPA mean for our motivation. What does it mean for us when we want to create a drawing habit? My ten day drawing challenge will help you immensely to get going. The key is here to have an immediate dopamine release after you finish a practice. Our goal should be something like this. Today, I will finish a 10 minutes drawing exercise. Simple and short. You practice for 10 minutes, you reach your goal. Dopamine is released, you feel good. Be proud and celebrate. Enjoy this dose of dopamine. Tomorrow, it will be even easier. You know how great you will feel after this practice session. It's even easier to get started. After a few days, the next factor will push you even further. You will see how your strokes have improved. This then releases even more dopamine in return. After the ten day drawing challenge is over, you will feel so hooked to drawing that you can easily go on with your daily practice. Luckily, you will have a toolbox full of beneficial exercises you can choose from. I will give you even more practice ideas at the end of this class. You can use them to warm up or to release creativity. Just go on with your daily practice, and you'll become a better artist every day while feeling great. Let's get started with the challenge and our first day's exercise in our next lesson. I will see you there. 6. Day 1 All About Shapes: Hi, and welcome to your first exercise. For this, you will need the day one exercise page and any pen or pencil of your choice. When you work in procreate, make sure you have the page assist enabled. You can do that under the wrench tool, Canvas, page assist. This way, you can flip through the pages easily. Go to the page that says Day one exercise, then open the layers panel and add a layer on top. Turn this layer into a clipping mask. I will use my nice liner fine, which basically works like any fine liner. But a pencil will work fine too. Let's now fill the top box here with loads of basic shapes. There can be squares, rectangles, triangles, circles or ovals. Each item we see can be reduced to basic shapes. That's why it is important to feel confident in drawing them. Don't worry if your strokes aren't perfect right away. Just read you the same line until you're happy with the result. We just want to train our muscles and get used to drawing with confidence. You can rotate your paper or canvas. If you want. Make sure you fill even the tiniest space with a shape. Focus on the line you're drawing at that moment. Feel the confidence growing with every shape. Notice, what is easier to draw for you, horizontal or vertical lines. This is a great exercise to get familiar with drawing shapes. If you find that boring, why don't you add fun faces to your shapes? Let's try in the exercise below. First, you draw a shape, and then you draw faces showing emotions you can think of. Happy, sad, tired, scared, and so on. This helps you not only with your basic shapes, but also with creating a repertoire of eyes, mouth, and so on for your future drawings. Doctor And once this box is filled two, you have finished your first practice. Make sure you repeat this practice every now and then. Maybe next time, when you want to draw during a phone call, give yourself a pat on the back now. You reached your goal. That is amazing. And this is the time to tick the first box in your progress tracker. Export it together with your exercise. Then you can create your class project. I'm looking forward to see your shapes. And with that, we're one day down nine more to go. Come back tomorrow for your next exercise. I will see you there. 7. Day 2 All About Lines: Hi, and welcome to the second exercise, where it's all about lines. I am so proud of you that you showed up again. I hope so are you. Can you imagine how awesome you will feel at the end of this practice? Just take a moment to anticipate that, and then we'll jump right into it. For this one, I will use my nice liner jacket and maybe a pencil. If you follow along on paper, you might need an eraser too. Here I am on the second day's page of the workbook. Don't forget to add a layer and turn it into a clipping mask when you work in procreate. As already mentioned, today is all about lines. Let's start with vertical lines in this top left box here. Draw lines from top to bottom, but practice your confident strokes. If the line looks wonky, that's no problem. Our hands and muscles need to get used to this motion. That's not too difficult, isn't it? You can also see how my lines improved as I reached the end of this box. Then let's move on to the next box where we want to draw horizontal lines. I find these a bit harder to draw. It's due to the direction of the motion. When I move my hand up and down, my hand stays on the same axis. But when I move my hand from side to side, it makes a slight curve. That's what we need to compensate for when drawing straight horizontal lines. Since I am a lefty, I found this position that works for me. You might need to play around with a position that works well for you. There's no need to draw long lines in one go. You can make shorter but confident strokes instead. This way, you can correct your direction throughout. As you can see, drawing horizontal lines is way more difficult. Of course, you could just rotate the canvas or your paper, but that's not always possible. Make sure you keep practicing your horizontal lines as well. Let's move on to diagonal lines. Here, you also need to play around until you find a drawing position that works best for you. Which direction is easier for you. Let us know when you upload your exercise to your class project. For me, it's the lines that lean to the left, probably because I am left handed. Now onto wavy lines. I want to split the box in halves and draw vertical ones on one side and horizontal ones in the other. Interestingly here, I find horizontal waves easier to draw than vertical ones. And in our last box, you can combine the different lines into a pattern. I will split the box into triangles with a pencil, and then I'll get going. You do whatever comes to your mind. And with that, our second exercise is done. You did very well, so be proud of your accomplishment. Don't forget to tick the box on your tracker and update your class project. Two days do, eight more to go. Come back tomorrow for your next exercise. I will see you there. Oh. 8. Day 3 All About Size: Hi, and welcome to our third exercise. How did you feel after your practice yesterday? I hope you celebrated your achievement. If not, let me do that today. You can be very proud of yourself for pushing through and showing up today again. Today, we want to repeat drawing basic shapes. But this time, we want to focus on their size. I am here on the exercise page for day three when working in Procreate, don't forget to add a new layer and turn it into a clipping mask. I want to use my sketcher HB today. In this top box, we will draw rows with the same basic shape, and we will try to keep them all equal in size. Be gentle with yourself. This is a practice. Nothing needs to be perfect. In case you wonder why I always start on the right side with my drawings, it's just because I am left handed. And when I draw on paper and start on the left, I will smudge my drawings because my hand wipes over them. So eventually, I just got used to starting on the right side of the paper to avoid smearing. This exercise might feel a bit tedious. So in the next box, you will make it more fun for you. Draw the shapes in a pattern, for example, or use different colors. Or try out the new pens you got from your latest stationary shopping hall. Get creative, but don't overthink it and give yourself grace. And with this, the third exercise of this drawing challenge is done. You did it. You showed up again and you pushed through. Well done. Make sure you tick the box on your tracker and update your class project. Leave some praise with your peers, too. Three days do and seven more to go. Come back tomorrow for another exercise. I will see you there. 9. Day 4 Adding Dimension: Hi, and welcome to day four of our ten day drawing challenge. How did you celebrate yesterday's achievement? Did you treat yourself to something special like ice cream? You can share that with us when you upload your today's project. Today is going to be about dimension. We will turn two D shapes into three D. I will use my sketcher, six B for today's exercise. Let's have a look at the example. We are supposed to use the given shapes and put them in dimension. Let's start with this rectangle here. We will recreate this one. And add another one. Then we draw the lines to match the corners. And here we have a box. Let's add some dark sides to indicate the light source that is probably coming from the front. And our box is done. I guess its correct name is boid. Let's continue the same way with our trapezoid. And here we are supposed to create a square base pyramid, which is fairly simple. Just add a point on top and match that with the corners of the square. Ta. It's done. And lastly, we create a prism. Copy the triangle and draw another one above it. Then draw lines to match the corners. Let's draw the shade as well. Easy PZ. In the next exercise, we want to indicate the roundness of the objects. We only need to draw standing or laying ovals to show the depth of our objects. Just watch how I do it here as it is easier to show you instead of explaining. All right. And as an additional exercise, you can take another piece of paper or add another layer in procreate, and there you can draw more three D shapes, round or angular, whatever comes to your mind. And then we finished exercise four as well. Y, I bet. You strokes are way more confident after day four. Tell us about it in your project date. And then lean back and admire how far you've come already. Day four done six more to go. Come back tomorrow for another fun exercise. I will see you there. 10. Day 5 Light And Shadow: Hi, and welcome to day five of our ten day drawing challenge. Once this exercise is over, we are halfway through. That's a reason to celebrate and check in with yourself. How do you feel with your drawings after five days of practice? Today, we will look for ways to depict light and shadow in our drawings. We are on the day five exercise page, if you are working in procreate, remember to add another layer and turn it into a clipping mask. In Exercise one, we will create values of darkness with hatching. Keeping the lines further away from each other appears light, and the closer we move them together, the darker it gets. Let's replicate this example. I am using my sketcher six B here. Don't be as accurate. Remember, you do you, and a drawing looks more natural with messy and even wonky strokes. It also tells a lot about your style. The next way to indicate daka values is called pointsm. As the name reveals, it has to do with dots. A lot of dots. Keep them apart. It appears light. Put them closely together. It gets dark. And in our last exercise, we will create a value scale. Here, we need to work with pressure. Using the pencil without pressure, creates a light gray, and the more pressure we apply, the dw. I recommend to not with the tip of your pencil, but keeping it tilted and sight. If you're not happy with the value, then you draw over several spaces once more. And here we are, Half time. Pat your back. You deserve it. It takes a lot to come back every day and finish an exercise. But you made it. It's time to tick your tracker box and upload your project. Let's congratulate each other for making it halfway. Five days done. Five more to go. Come back tomorrow for another fun exercise. I will see you there. 33 11. Day 6 Perspective: T Hi, and welcome to the second half of our drawing challenge. How do you feel? I hope you feel more confident when you pick up your pencil and that you were looking forward to practicing today. Today is the last part of the drawing fundamental section, and we will cover drawing in perspective. Let's have a quick intro to perspective drawing f. Perspective means you draw something from your point of view literally. The topic of perspective drawing could fill a class on its own, and we will focus on its simplest form here, the linear one point perspective. However, once you've understood this concept, you can easily build on it. There are a few terms that are worth explaining. The horizon is the line where the sky meets the land or water below. The height of the horizon will affect the placement of the vanishing points, as well as the scenes eye level. The vanishing point is the place where parallel lines appear to come together in the distance. A theme can have a limitless number of vanishing points. The ground plane is the horizontal surface below the horizon. It could be land or water. The orthogonal lines are lines that are directed to a vanishing point. The parallel lines of a road, for example. If I draw a cue, all the parallel lines that show depth are going to be turned into orthogonal lines. Moving the vanishing point along the horizon changes the viewing direction, and moving the horizon up and down changes the eye level. Important. Lines that are parallel to the horizon stay horizontal in a single point perspective. All right. With that out of the way, we move over to page ten in our workbook and look at the exercise there. When working in procreate, don't forget to add a new layer. It is not important which pen you use. I will draw with my sketcher tack. We see a checker board here, and we are supposed to bring that into a one point perspective. There is the baseline which tells us where the bottom line of our pattern should be. Up there is our vanishing point, which means all orthogonal lines are directed towards this point. We've also heard that the horizontal lines stay horizontal. However, the closer we move towards the vanishing point, the distance between them decreases. We don't have to draw it super straight and absolutely correct. T to your best and eyeball, what looks correct for you. Of course, we could use a ruler or the perfect shape tool in procreate. It would help us create straight lines. I'm not a fan of that look though. In an artwork, hand drawn lines feel more natural and organic to me. It's also a great way to practice drawing your lines. And this first exercise is done. Now I want you to explore this even further. On a new piece of paper or a new layer, I would like you to move the vanishing point. Move it up and down to the left, and to the right. See what happens with the lines and notice how you will be more and more foreseeing what the shape has to look like. This is what I came up with. Hey, and now we reached another milestone. We've covered drawing the fundamentals way to go. Make sure you come back to these exercises now and then, especially when you don't know what to draw, or suffer something like a creative block and wish to wake up your creativity. I promise this does wonders. From tomorrow on, we will focus on training our right brain hemisphere to learn to draw what we really see. Time to tick the box four day six of our progress tracker and update our class project. Six days down for more to go. Come back tomorrow for another fun exercise. I will see you there. 12. Day 7 The Non Dominant Hand: Hi, and welcome to day seven of our drawing challenge. Now that you've practiced the fundamentals of drawing, your muscles have started to build and you gained a lot more confidence. You can focus on drawing with the right side of your brain. If you recall the lesson where we've talked about the brain, you remember that our brain tries to work efficiently by referring back to memories instead of verifying reality. Remember the simple flower our brain wants you to draw just because it's quicker and easier than observing a real one. But observing is extremely important, and our brain needs to understand that where we want to draw, we don't want to be quick and efficient. Here's to learning how to observe and empower the right side of the brain by drawing with your non dominant hand. Yes, you've heard right. Trust me. This is going to work. If you are right handed, you will do this exercise with your left hand and vice versa. I want you to find a reference photo of a simple flower. I like using photos from websites like Pixabay or unsplash. Download the photo of your choice. If you work on paper, you just use this device to show the reference photo. If you work in Procreate, you can use the reference function by tapping the wrench tool, Canvas, reference, and then choosing the photo from your camera role. Of course, you can skip the downloading step completely and just draw in split view. Open page 11 in your workbook. When working in procreate, remember to add a new layer and turn it into a clipping mask. Now, you're going to draw what you see with your non dominant hand. Please understand that the goal here is not to create the most beautiful artwork, but to engage the right brain side. By doing something completely new and unusual, we can trick our brains and make them stop drawing from memory. We are forced to focus on the image, as well as our wrong drawing hand. This will create new links in our brain, which is what always happens when we learn something new. So don't judge your drawing. It will most likely look awful. Instead, see the fun in this exercise. I am basically giggling all the time. It feels so weird and my right hand is so clumsy. But I do also feel how engaged my brain is and how intensely I am observing my motif, just to tell my clumsy right hand what exactly to draw. And that's my flower attempt, drawn with my non dominant hand. It's definitely not my greatest work ever, but this exercise was very important for our brains to get rid of old behavior patterns that don't work anymore when drawing. Instead, we re linked our neurons and created new connections. So, well done you. That was a lot of work for your brain. Make sure you praise yourself for another great achievement. Tick the box in your progress tracker, update your class project, and leave some praise with your fellow students class projects, too. And then it's time for a celebration. How about a young cookie? Seven days down, three more to go. Come back tomorrow for another fun exercise. I will see you there. 13. Day 8 Upside Down: Hi, and welcome to our eighth exercise. Did you enjoy yesterday's unusual way of drawing? What cookie did you treat yourself with? Tell us about it when you update your project. Today's exercise is a hilarious one as well. We will draw from reference, but this time, the reference photo needs to be turned upside down. I want you to repeat the steps we did yesterday by finding a reference photo. How about one of a beverage of your choice? It could be a coffee mark, a cocktail, or whatever else comes to your mind. Unsplash and pix survey are great sources for high quality photos. But of course, you can use your own photo as well. Download them into your camera roll, a tap at it. Now we need to rotate the photo until it's upside down. Save it. We draw on page 12 in our workbook, and if you work in Procreate, add a new layer and turn it into a clipping mask. Same as yesterday, use your device to display your reference when you draw on paper and the reference function when working in procreate. Use whatever pen you prefer, I will use my Sketch six B for today's exercise. Now draw what you see. You might wonder. Why should you even bother drawing something upside down? Well, it can be surprisingly helpful when practicing your art skills. When you draw something upside down, your brain can't easily recognize the subject. This forces you to focus on the actual lines, shapes, and proportions, rather than the object itself. It's a great way to see things as they really are, not how you think they should be. We've learned that our brains tend to use cuts and symbols for familiar objects. Drawing upside down helps to break this habit. Furthermore, it engages the right hemisphere of the brain, and you improve your attention to detail and overall accuracy by concentrating on individual components rather than the whole image. And again, be gentle with yourself. This exercise is also not to create a masterpiece, but to train your right brain side. However, when turning my finish drawing upside down, I am fairly surprised at how good it looks and how many details I was able to depict correctly. Did you notice the same? Tell us about how it fell to you to draw upside down when you update your project. And it's time to tick your box for day eight, and of course, a happy dance for showing up and practicing today. Eight days down, two more to go. Come back tomorrow for another fun exercise. I will see you there. 14. Day 9 Blind Drawing: Le. H i, and welcome to your second to last drawing exercise. I had such a blast with all the exercises so far. I hope so had you. Today's practice will train your observation and replication skills again. The right brain hemisphere will get another boost. We will practice drum roll, blind drawing meaning. We draw without looking at our paper or canvas. I know it's hard to believe that this is going to be helpful. Trust me, it is tremendously. I will explain more in a minute. Now I need you to choose a reference photo once more. You are familiar with the process already, and today's subject is these. Find page 13 of your workbook. Again, when drawing in Procreate, don't forget to add a new layer and turn it into a clipping mask. Now draw from your reference and don't look at your hand. When working in procreate, you cannot use the reference function this time, but you will need another device to display your reference photo. I filmed myself while drawing blind. First, to prove that I don't look at my hand, and second, to show the grimaces I make while trying to avoid looking at my hand. Maybe it makes you laugh. And as promised. Here's why blind drawing is a fantastic exercise. By focusing only on the reference, you train your eyes to notice fine details that you might overlook otherwise. This sharpens your observational skills which are crucial for realistic drawing. Blind drawing strengthens the connection between what you see and how your hand moves. This hand eye coordination is essential for accurately translating visual information onto paper. Since you're not looking at your paper, the pressure to make a perfect drawing decreases. This can help you relax and enjoy the process even more, making you more open to experimentation and creativity. It will boost your confidence and because you're not constantly checking your work, your lines tend to be more continuous and fluid. This can add a sense of movement and life to your drawings. It's a fun and challenging exercise that can bring a fresh perspective to your art practice. Let's look at my finished work. Of course, it is a mess. But I didn't want to make a great art here. I can look at my work without judging. As I know it was super beneficial for my art skills, and it trained my brain and muscles. I can't wait to see how you tackled this blind drawing exercise. So Tick your box in your progress tracker and update your class project. Maybe you can even show a photo of yourself while drawing. Were you making funny faces as well? Anyway. Excellent work today. Don't forget to celebrate your achievement. Nine days done. One more to go. Come back tomorrow for our last exercise. I will see you there. 15. Day 10 Reduce and Refine: Hi, and welcome to the last day of our drawing challenge. Oh, man, I am quite sad that it's over now. But I know that I have created a new habit, and I will continue practicing every day to further improve my drawing. Today, we will draw a hand. We will wrap up everything we've learned and combine it in a step by step drawing exercise. I have chosen this subject on purpose, and I can hear you sighing. I know, most people find drawing hands super difficult. That's why I want to show you a way of how to tackle difficult drawing subjects. First of all, take a photo of your hand, fingers, stretched. That's going to be your reference photo. Open page 14 of your workbook, and when working in procreate, add a new layer and turn it into a clipping mask. I am drawing with my sketcher tech today, but the pen choice doesn't really matter. When drawing something you find difficult, it is good to draw in steps. Start rough and reduce to minimal visual information and then refine step by step. Make sure you have your reference ready. Let's first mark the overall size of our hand. I will draw something like a bounding box in which my hand will be. Then I mark the ends of my fingers and where my fore arm starts. This line here indicates where my palm transitions into the fingers. You can see me now drawing basic shapes. My palm consists of a rectangle and something like a trapezoid. My thumb starts from something like a triangle. It's built of two rectangles with the knuckles in between. I indicate them as circles or ovals. My four fingers consists of three rectangles with the circles in between. These are, of course, the knuckles. My fingernails can be indicated with ovals as well, and here is the basic shape of a hand. In our next step, we start to refine our drawing. We draw flowy lines connecting all the parts and add more details. And all of a sudden, we have a great drawing of a hat here. Would you have ever expected to be able to do that? Now, you see, you are. The trick is to start simple and reduce to minimal information rather than laying down the perfect art right away. It's hardly possible to start with the end result. No, we need to approach that step by step. Always reduce to basic shapes, and then refine layer by layer, adding more lines and details. When drawing on paper, you can carefully erase the basic lines in the end or trace your sketch on a new sheet of paper using a light box to see through. In procreate, you can add new layers and refine your drawing gradually. Then you can turn off the visibility of the layers with the sketches. And now we reached the end of the last exercise. I can only say bravo, and you're doing great in building your practicing habit. I want you to lean back and flip through your workbook. Can you see the improvement you've made throughout? What was your favorite exercise? Tell us about it when you update your class project. And of course, tick the last box in your progress tracker. And then be proud. You've made it. You are amazing. Celebrate that. In our next video, I will show you some more exercises you can incorporate into your daily practice collection. I will see you there. 16. Additional Exercises: As promised, here are some more drawing exercises you should include in your daily practice. Let's start with 32nd sketches. For this exercise, you will need a time. I'm going to use my old phone for that. But a kitchen will do too. Set your to seconds. Now, you need to collect a variety of images or observe scenes with interesting subjects. Now you draw each of your reference within those 30 seconds, and you try to capture the essence of the object without worrying about the details. This improves speed and efficiency, teaching you to capture the essential elements of a subject quickly. It also helps you to prioritize the most important aspects of your subject and encourages you to experiment and be playful. Our next exercise is gesture or poses drawing. This is one of my favorite. I like to use the website line of action for it. You can use this portal for free, even without creating an account. It's also useful for 30 seconds sketching, by the way, as it offers sections for still life, nature, and shapes now. Anyway, we focus on figures in this exercise. We can make our settings about the kind of models we want to see. We choose same length and set the interval to a short period like 30 to 60 seconds. Then have fun drawing. Here again, try to catch the essence and flow of the pose rather than details and practice loose sweeping lines. This exercise will help you to see and replicate the core movement and structure of a body. The next exercise is negative space drawing, a very interesting one as well. Find a reference image again. Start with a simple object that has a clear and interesting negative space. Now, you outlined the negative spaces around your object. Focus on accurately drawing and shading these spaces, and you will see how your subject will be defined by its surrounding voids. This practices your composition skill as it teaches you to consider the entire composition, including the balance of positive and negative spaces. It also reduces our typical symbol drawing. Very useful, indeed. And here we are at the fourth additional exercise. The continuous line drawing. Here, we have to draw an entire image using one continuous line without ever lifting pen or pencil. We start at a point on our subject and let our hand move fluidly across the paper or canvas. We try to capture the essential contours and shapes. We can go back and let our lines overlap. We only need to make sure we maintain a continuous line. This is a very good exercise for our hand eye coordination, and it promotes fluid confident lines. The last exercise will help you with proportion. It's the gritting. Here we need another reference image, and we will draw a grid over it. Then we draw a corresponding grid onto our paper or Canvas. In procreate, it works better the other way around by the way. Now we will focus on one square at a time, carefully drawing the content within it. This helps us to pay close attention to the details and proportions. It makes complex subjects more manageable and simplifies the drawing process. So we feel less intimidated. What do you think of these five exercises? Let us know in your project which one you will try out first. You definitely have a huge variety of exercises now. Choose one of them every day or maybe do the same one every day for an entire week and see where it leads you. Just continue to practice and to celebrate your achievements. Let's move on to our final lesson now, where we will wrap up this class. I will see you there. 17. Whats next?: And here we are at the end of this class. I am really proud of you that you stuck through and finished your ten day drawing challenge. This was not an easy task, as we all know, how hard it is to establish a new habit. But you did it. You have practiced the fundamentals of drawing with basic exercises, and you learned how to use the right hemisphere of your brain. By now, you found out how you can condition yourself by using me for your motivation, which, by the way, works for any other task as well. You have now a toolbox full of highly effective drawing exercises. Keep going. Your skills have already improved and you want to build up on that. Make sure you schedule a minimum of 10 minutes daily before your practice. I have created this set of exercises that vary in length. You can pick and choose depending on your schedule and your mood. Keep in mind, consistency is key when it is about lasting results. Before we come to an end, I would like to ask you for a favor. If you've liked my class and the resources that came with it, then I'm asking you to please leave a review. What only takes you a few clicks does help us educators a long way, as well as other students to find this class. I would also love to stay in touch with you to see your progress. Make sure you follow me here as well as on social media. If you're curious to see what I'm up to, you can also subscribe to my newsletter. I'll leave the link in the progress and resources tab. And here's to thank you for taking my class and staying with me until the very end. It was a pleasure having you in my ten day drawing challenge. And I hope to see you in any of my future classes until then happy drawing. Bye.