Learn The 3 Building Blocks of Drawing & a 7 Day Practice Challenge for Quick Growth

1. Trailer: Are you tired of feeling frustrated with your drawing skills? Are you confused on what to do to improve quickly, or are you just burnt out or maybe feeling rusty? Don't worry, all of these are normal. Drawing has its ups and downs and it can be quite challenging, but also rewarding. I've created this class to help you break through those drawing barriers and unlock your creative potential. Hi, I'm Yasmina, a whimsical and fun artist. I've been honing my craft for over 10 years. Even though I've been doing it for so long and I have a playful style, I still find it helpful to periodically go back to basics and sharpen my skills. Why not do that together? In this class, we'll be focusing on the three most important building blocks of drawing, observation, stylization, and memorization. These skills build on each other and I'll show you how and why. With some basic exercises, you'll develop a keen eye for detail, learn how to infuse your unique style into your art, and work on your memory, which is key for learning to draw from imagination. We'll also embark on an exciting seven-day challenge that will push your skills to the next level. By the end of the class, you'll be equipped with a handy worksheet to analyze your strengths and weaknesses and have the tools to hone your skills. Think of this class as strength-building exercises that will make you powerful in defeating your drawing foes so that you can draw anything you like and explore your unlimited artistic potential with whatever style you choose. With my help, you'll see immediate improvement in your drawing skills. There's absolutely no stress here. We're now making art for the results, we're just practicing. Quiet down the inner critic, grab a pencil, and let's jump in. 2. The 3 Drawing Building Blocks: Hey welcome to the class, so when an artist draws something, anything, they are using three main skill sets. They all connect together and are essential to being able to draw well. The three building blocks of drawing are observation, stylization, and memorization. Let's start with observation which is the foundation of drawing anything and making it believable. This is the most important block and no other can exist without it. If you don't know how to truly see, drawing will be very hard and your results won't look like the subject. The thing is our brain likes to tell us what we see but in reality it has preconceived notions of what our subject ought to look like and a lot of those are based on childhood drawings that we did like this one. This is why a lot of people say they can only draw stick figures because that's all they drew as children. It's just a leftover from their childhood but in reality they can draw anything if they learn to see. A lot of beginners tend to draw things with their brain instead of with their eyes and then they wonder why it doesn't look like the subject. Here's a great example from my see better to draw better class which has a bunch of drawing exercises. I had my husband draw this line and as you can see his proportions are pretty off and he's not an artist by the way and then I had him draw it upside down. Logically you would think this would be harder but if you overlay it with the original it looks much more accurate. That's because when it was upside down he didn't think the word lion but instead he saw a bunch of lines and shapes. Instead of using his brain he used his eyes and let his pencil jot down what his eyes observed. This is a great example and actually a great thing to do to work on your observation muscle. If you want to try out this little experiment, you can download the worksheet and give it a go yourself. The biggest takeaway is to think in terms of lines, shapes and values instead of the name of the subject when you draw something. My best advice to understand how to do this is to look at a subject as if you're seeing it for the first time. Don't label it, just look, so this just requires a shift in the way you think when you're drawing and the more you do it, the better you get at it. The best way to work out this observation muscle is to do life studies which just means drawing what you see in real life. You want to get a subject that is hard to draw and that's weird like shoes with shoelaces or plant leaves that overlap, something that forces you to pay attention. We'll talk about this more in a future lesson and I'll show you many examples. Now that we know how to observe we can tweak what we see in the second building block, we can stylize. Stylization is built on observations, so in order to stylize you have to first master observing because we're going to be doing something that I just told you not to do. We're going to let our brain play with what we see. Why is it okay to do now but it wasn't a second ago? Well because by learning to truly see and how to observe, we are now playing with accurate information instead of outdated data from our childhood or from our brains guessing what things look like. When we have accurate data we can play with it to the extreme and it will still be recognizable. Stylization can be done in infinite ways. Here I took a mere cat and I made it super cute by just simplifying and following some rules of cuteness from my you can draw cute animals class. Notice how before I stylize I did a quick study sketch to observe the mere cat and then once I have that information I was able to play with it. Here's another example of a kiwi. I took a real kiwi reference and then I made it my own by putting a heart in the middle and simplifying and I used ink and watercolor. I really play with the style by making the fun background. As you can see, the medium you choose and techniques you use can really have a huge effect on your style. Style truly is infinite and if you want to learn more, you can take my class in stylizing to help you find your style but in this class I want to keep it simple and just focus on simplification and play with what we see. It's okay if you keep most of the realism just start practicing with tweaking what you're observing, being selected with what we put down and playing with our subject matter as we observe it is the first stepping stone to stylizing. Another way is to draw it in a way that brings you joy. Maybe use a fun medium or colors or simplify or add doodles and more detail, anything you want to do, just first, observe and then play. If you feel comfortable, you can be super extreme with your style and play with it to the max this will help build your imagination muscle which is also super important and ties into all the three blocks, so don't worry about style too much if you're a beginner. First focus on observing. But once you feel you can see and draw what you see, feel free to play with your style as much as you want. I also believe we shouldn't be glued to one style. The joy of creating in the moment is more important so just have fun. The last skill we're going to touch on in the last building block is memorization and I know some people think they have a bad memory but trust me you can practice and you'll get better at it. Memorizing actually ties into stylizing because being able to memorize what something looks like or how it acts gives us the ability to not only draw from imagination but also tweak details we don't like in a reference and make them our own but keep them believable. I also want to point out that anytime you draw anything and I mean anything except may be blind contours which require you to not look away from their subject as you draw but all other drawing is drawing from memory. If you look at your subject for three seconds and then look at your paper for two and draw what you just saw, you just used your memory. This is why developing a memory skill is essential. Another awesome part that a lot of artists strive for is being able to draw without references but this takes a lot of study and time. I did something similar here by setting lots of alpacas, I tried my best to observe their features and body shape and the more I observed it, the better I understood them. Before this exercise I would not have been able to draw an alpaca from memory but after here is my alpaca and I think it turned out pretty good especially the body shape and this was just from one hour of practice. Can you imagine if I practiced drawing alpacas every single day, maybe in a month I'd be able to just draw one whenever I felt like it in any angle, this is how a lot of artists draw people from imagination. This is actually one of the hardest things to draw but if you memorize how human anatomy works and how faces look at different angles, you'll be able to do it. But first it takes a ton of observational studies. If your goal is to draw something from your imagination, just study lots and lots and then try drawing from imagination and repeat the cycle many times. In one day, you'll be able to. If you think your memory is bad, don't worry all things can be improved with practice and I have a fun worksheet that will help you to test it and I'm sure you'll do better than you think. These are the three building blocks and now that we know what they are and why they're important, let's keep the ball rolling and talk about style versus skill. 3. Style VS Skill: You probably know Pablo Picasso, who doesn't? His work is so famous and pretty abstract and doesn't look like he knows how to paint realistically. In fact, I used to think that he was just always an abstract artist. But before he painted like a child, he actually mastered realism, painted gorgeous realistic paintings like these, though he himself loved the work he did later in life more than these, since he famously said, "It took me four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child." I think it's so important that he first learned how to paint realistically. The reason is because he was not limited to what he can create based on skill. He learned how to truly see. Picasso ended up doing childish art as he calls it. But what if you end up doing realistic portraits and those bring you the most joy? How would you know what kind of art you enjoy making the most if you don't try it first? If you feel limited and never learn, then yes, you will never truly know your potential. My personal style is so loose and whimsical and cute but I also enjoy painting semi-realistic paintings. Sometimes I paint like a little kid too. I love having the freedom to make whatever I want to in the moment. I encourage every artist to challenge themselves and get good at their craft before settling on a particular style and maybe never stop exploring random styles. You can develop your style as you study, of course, and play anytime but take the time to do the harder work that isn't as fun like drawing celebs because it'll benefit you and your style in the long run. You need to have the skill before you can have the style. Because if you have the style first, you'll be limited in what you can make. I don't know about you, but I love having unlimited creative potential and not being boxed in. Just work on getting better and your style will come with time. Now let's learn more about why practicing the skill of drawing from life is so important. 4. Why Draw From Life?: In this class, I will draw from life most of the time. Using photos is fantastic and we are so lucky to live in a time where we can Google any subject we want and have access to this huge visual library at our fingertips. If you're anything like me, you probably draw from references 99% of the time or maybe you've never drawn from life at all. There's nothing wrong with drawing from references, but there's a reason that every article out there forces you to draw from life most of the time. I drew these in a class, I took ones and I remember improving the most when I was forced to challenge myself. I had no idea I could draw this well because they used to just draw cartoony and it really helped me to see like an artist. I know how awesome it is from personal experience to challenge yourself with drawing from life. Whenever I feel rusty at drawing, I do a quick live setting, it really helps me to be good at it again. There are so many benefits of drawing from life, like improve observation skills, spatial awareness, and hand-eye coordination. That said, for most people, it is much harder than drawing from a photo so yes, it will challenge you, but trust me, it's worth it for how quickly you will develop many skills. Let's talk about those skills. When we draw from life, we are forced to observe the subject in the 3D world. We are taking the 3D and making a 2D, which photos do for you automatically. You are using a different part of your brain and makes you more aware of how things look like in real life, you get a better at seeing depth and understanding how things work in the real world, which makes it easier to draw things from references and making them more lifelike. You're developing your spatial awareness skill. This takes more concentration, forces us to truly see what is in front of us, instead of letting our brains tell us what we see, this really helps your observation. We also can see all the detail of our subject. Observing from a life is much more immersive than a photo. The latest iPhone Pro Max camera has 48 megapixels, but your eyes are 576 according to Google. Not only that, but you can see the light source and the environment your subject is interacting with and it helps you to understand how light and shadow work. You can also take a subject and draw it in 360 and see from every angle and you can really understand its form. Another perk is you can pick subject matters that don't have photos out there. When we draw something we don't normally draw or normally look at it forces us to observe. A lot of artists vouch for life drawing and as far as I know, all articles require it. The problem is when artists are self-taught like I am and want the convenience of reference photos only. We don't develop our drawing and observation skills as quickly or as strongly so this is why I recommend drawing from life. You're going to see me draw a lot of veggies in the next few lessons because their shapes are so organic, simple, and fun to study. You can also hold them in your hand and rotate them. They are perfect for beginners. I encourage you to also use fruits and veggies if you're new to drawing. But if you're an experienced artists pick more complex subjects that will challenge you. You can draw anything you like maybe even go outside and look for fun subjects, or do a figure drawing class for an extra challenge, or a portrait of your pet sleeping, or just draw the room you're sitting in with clutter and all, or set up a simple still life scene like you'll see me do in the future lessons. There are many ways to do life drawings and I'm not saying to do exclusive studies from life, you can use references and I do so all the time. I just want you to try life drawing as well because it works on so many parts of your brain that references don't. Now that we know why life drawing is so important, let's talk about what mediums to draw with. 5. What to Draw With: You can draw with anything you like, whether it's charcoal, ballpoint pen, or pencil, or even ink, it's up to you. I encourage you to try out different supplies you have and play with them. But if I had to pick just one tool for drawing and the most accessible tool especially if you don't have any supplies, it would be a pencil that you can sharpen, that is 4B, 6B, or 8B. This way you can make light and dark lines with just one tool. You can also use charcoal but it's a little messy and a lot of beginners don't like the mess. I recommend a pencil that you can sharpen because you can use its side to make thicker, loose lines which come in handy when doing quick shading. I like to keep my studies quick so I don't get bored with them. Try doing a value scale like this going from light to dark, thought with a feather light touch, barely touching your papers, and then gradually use more pressure and more pressure until you're pressing down pretty hard for the darkest part. You can go over the darkest part a few times to make sure it's as dark as can be. You can also keep your lines closer together for a darker look and I can space my part for a lighter look. There's also so many other ways to shade. For example, here I did crosshatching in my inking class. I mean, just do what feels right to you. I'm going to be mostly doing scribbles. It's okay if all you have is a regular HB pencil too, but you won't be able to make your lines as dark as you can see here. Just use what you have and next time you're somewhere they have art supplies, you can pick up a darker pencil if you don't have one already. The technical term for this is a pencil with softer lead. I know that can be confusing. Harder lead is lighter and softer lead is darker. I'm going to be using this woodless Progresso. Know not the soup 4B pencil for the first drawings I will show you. Is called the wordless pencil because it doesn't have the wood holding the lead. I like it because I have even more pencil to play with when I draw. It helps me to shade even faster, but this is just what I grabbed when I started filming. Now this brand is not the best and you got to have it. There are many wonderful brands out there, and I've never really seen a bad pencil. The most important thing is to just practice putting lines on paper. Use whatever you have and have fun. As for paper, just use any paper you have, printer paper is perfect for most supplies. Before we jump into drawing, I want to quickly go over my favorite drawing process in case you're not sure how to draw. 6. The 3 Simple Steps: If you've taken my, You Can Draw Anything class, you would already be familiar with the three simple steps that you can use to draw anything no matter how complex it may seem. Let's go over these again. Step 1 is to break down your subject into simple shapes and lines. This is done so easily and there isn't one perfect way to do it. Here are some complex subjects broken down. No matter how complicated a subject may seem, you can do this too. Here's one broken down in three different ways and guess what? All are correct. Just draw the shapes and lines that stick out to you. If you find this difficult, use a tablet or a sharpie and a magazine or pictures and draw or write on top of the images until it becomes second nature to see basic shapes. Just simplify. This step shouldn't take a long time. It's quick and intuitive, but it does take practice to get there. Grab your pencil and follow along in drawing this radish with me. Let's practice. I'm using a photo this time so you can see exactly what I'm seeing. I'm just going to observe the shapes. I see this oval and there's this triangle right underneath. This line goes out for the root and then we have this triangular shape going up, and there's one triangular leaf shape on the side. As you can see, I'm taking the complex and I'm simplifying. The most important part of this is to get the proportions right. Once we have the proportions, we can focus on the details and our drawing will look believable. When I started drawing, proportions were the hardest thing. So this really helps the drawing process. I'm simplifying the direction the leaves go into with a simple shape as well. If something looks too big or too small, just erase and try that part again. Take your time until the proportions look right. Even if you have to try a few times, it's just practice. I drew this quickly only because I have lots of experience and if you see different shapes from me, that's fine too. That's it for the basic shapes. Now it's time for step 2. So step 2 is to refine. This is where we focus on the outlines or the silhouette by actually paying attention to how the lines curve in the outline instead of just generalized shapes. Because the hardest part of proportions is over, we can do this step confidently and finish our sketch. Look at the reference at least the same amount of time as your paper. You don't have to take forever on this. Just do it quickly and just try to just jot down exactly what you see. Don't think radish, just think lines. For myself, if I go too slow, I get bored and overthink the process which can get me stuck. So don't worry about being super accurate. Just do your best at drawing what you see, even if it looks weird. The body and roots are almost the same as I already drew, but the leaves are so much more complex. But if I just think of it as lines and shapes instead of radish leaves is just a bunch of straight and wiggly lines and even if I make a mistake in this drawing, you cannot tell because it will still look like radish leaves. This is a low stroke subject and I recommend beginners pick low stroke subjects like vegetables. Notice how I started with the simpler stems and then I zoomed into each part that I'm drawing and just focusing on it. If you make a mistake, you can erase it but I encouraged you to just keep drawing. Don't worry about details at this stage, just the outlines. Notice how I drew outside the boundaries that I made, because some of the leaves it protrude out of it. But it still helped me to know the general shape they made. If you think your proportions are off, go ahead and draw over them. It doesn't matter, this is your drawing. You don't have to be glued to your sketch. You can draw over it or make it bigger, whatever feels right to you in the moment. Just do your best, especially if you're a beginner, don't worry about the results. It just takes practice to get better. So I'm done refining the outlines and there's no detail yet, just the outlines, but we have the radish and now we're ready for step 3. Step 3 is to add detail and finish your art. I'm going to go with my pencil and add details, and I'm just going to add shading. This is done differently depending on what medium you use and also what style. For example, I'm doing this in pencil, I'm going to be somehow realistic. So that's why I did it this way. But you can also finish in ink, watercolor, gouache, anything you like and depending on what medium you use, your results will look different, but you will have your basic sketch. Notice how loosely I'm shading and adding detail. I like to be messy and loose, but if you want yours to be more clean, you can take your time. Depending on what medium you use, you'll have different results. But there's all kinds of ways you can share it with a pencil from squiggly crazy lines to straight ones where you can cross hatching. It's up to you, but I like to be loose and quick again so I don't get bored and let's look at the benefits of doing this study. When adding shading with any medium, my biggest hack is to squint your eyes and look at the subject. This groups together lights and darks so the values become more prominent and it's easier to see where it should be lighter and where it should be darker and where your drawing is wrong so you can fix it, but don't worry about being 100% accurate. Just squint your eyes to see darks and lights if you're going to do shading like I am. Which I totally encourage because studying shading like this will help you to render 3D forums for any subject to draw the future. At this stage, we are also learning to see values in a colored image, which is a super important skill. But if this is really hard for you, you can take a photo into Photoshop or any other editing software and just make it black and white. Then you can go from black and white to color over time. I encourage you just to challenge yourself and try. Notice why I kept the white of the page at the top and it makes a nice highlight. I also have a shadow and a mid tone. Mid-tone is just the middle value, but don't worry about that too much. Just try to do it as you see it. Next thing, I'll go in and shade the leaves here and there. I'm not being perfect with it. I'm also adding more details with the veins of the leaves and any creases that I see and I'm done. We just did a quick summary holistic study of a radish. Good job and no worries if yours looks nothing like mine. The more you practice, the better you'll get. It just takes time and persistence. I personally can jump from step 1, doing the simple shapes, to step 3, refining with my favorite medium, skipping step 2 altogether and you will see me do that. But just keep in mind, that's because I have more experience with drawing. But I want you to have the freedom to draw in any way you like. If you're a complete beginner, just do all three steps in order for your drawing to be the easiest. But I also want you to feel free to draw in the way that feels right to you. When we do the seven-day challenge, you will see I free handed my drawings a lot because I really wanted to work on that skill. I didn't use the shapes because I just wanted to just get better at that and I suck at it. You'll see my drawings are pretty wonky when I do that. That's why the three simple steps are so wonderful and they'll prevent your drawings from looking bad. You can freehand too if you like that more, but it is harder. When I practice, I like to do both, so that way I get good at both. To recap three simple steps, which you can do the whole class by the way, you don't have to freehand, is just basic shapes to get the right proportions, refining by adding outlines and big details and then finishing off in your favorite medium, you can add shading at this stage in detail and anything else that needs to be added in. This will differ depending on your medium. Now we know the three steps which aren't that hard, I promise you can draw anything right now if you just utilize them, but you aren't going to make a lot of ugly art, especially if you're a beginner. So let's talk about that. 7. Ugly Art is Beautiful: Before we dive into the building blocks, let's talk about ugly art. When I recorded myself doing the upcoming challenge, I made some logos. Here's one, here's another, another one, another. They just keep coming. Part of this has to do with me trying to free hand a lot since I really wanted to work on that skill. But I'm not that stranded because I don't use it much. I usually use my three steps, but I wanted to challenge myself and I'm glad I did. So do I care that I made ugly art? No, because this is completely normal for learning. I make ugly art all the time in general anyway. It's okay. Does it make me any less of an artist? No. Everyone makes ugly art. Yes, even your art heroes, they just don't share it on social media. Ugly art is completely normal with beginners especially. When I started drawing, everything I made was ugly. There's nothing to be ashamed of. You are not a failure. You're just learning and this is normal. If you want to get good at drawing, it's important to let go of the fear of making ugly art. This is probably the thing that holds people back the most from growing and why lots of people give up. Don't make art for the results, especially when you're practicing like with this challenge. Do it for practice, for growth to get better and better. Practicing is just honing your skills. You need to put the sweat and the hard work. You need to make that ugly art before you make beautiful art. Even nowadays, for every beautiful piece I share on social media, I have one or two or three that I don't and I've been drawing over a decade now. So embrace your ugly art. Love it for what it teaches you and enjoy watching yourself get better, grow, change, evolve and learn. One day you'll look back at all your ugly art and you'll see how much better you got because of it. Please do keep your ugly drawings. It's so much fun and so rewarding to look back at them again when you improve as an artist. One year from now or five years from now or 20 years from now, imagine showing your children your ugly drawings and then your beautiful drawings and be like, see, you just got to practice. It's so important and in our society, a lot of people forget how important it is. I would say talent is like 5% and 95% is practice. So every ugly drawing you make has little nuggets of gold in it, learn from it, have that wisdom and grow from it. Maybe you'll learn how not to do something and maybe you'll learn how to do something good. Maybe there's just one little part that stands out to you that's beautiful. Do more of that. Grow from every piece and be gentle with yourself. After all, you are learning. Now that we got that out of the way, let's dive into the building blocks. 8. Observation: Now I going to go over the three building blocks I'm going to do some exercises to practice them. Observation is our first one and it's the most important one for drawing, if you can't observe your art won't be its best. Let's work on that in this exercise. I highly recommend you do each exercise because the only way to get good at anything is to learn by doing, watching videos is not going to make you better at that skill. You have to actually put the time in. If you find this challenging, don't worry, that's completely normal, especially if you're a beginner. Just do your best and just try to see, don't worry about anything else. The only goal is to see things exactly as they are, not to make them pretty. That's what we do when we stylize, but when we observe, we are just observing. The best mediums for this exercise are either a graphite pencil or charcoal, just something you can make lights or darks with quickly to make some realistic studies, I want you to grab an interesting looking subject. If you're a beginner, pick a fruit or veggies that has a fun, organic shape. But if you're an advanced artist, you can pick anything you like and if you're a beginner and you want to challenge yourself, you can pick a more interesting subject, it's up to you. The important thing is we're going to study this subject in 3D. We're going to look at it from every angle and draw it and try to understand, and this is going to help with our spatial awareness. Try to get something that looks different from different angles. An orange, for example is just a sphere. It's not the best choice, but something like a banana or a pineapple would be really fun. I'm going to be using a bell pepper. You can start off by observing your chosen subject and seeing how it looks in your hand. Try to let go of the notion of what your subject is and just get into observation mode. Look at it from every angle and just see. Now we're just going to take what we see and put it down on paper, try no to think of the subject's name instead, just see lines and shapes. If you are a more advanced artists, you can also challenge yourself more by drawing your hand as well holding the subject, which can be super fun because hands are hard to draw. Let's draw. Pick your first angle and then use the three steps to draw it. You can start with the basic shapes to help you with proportions and then draw in the outlines by just watching them. Don't worry about it looking perfect. Do these steps quickly so that you can do more of them. The more studies you do, the better you'll get and if you do them quickly, you're not going to get bored. This method of drawing is really simple. It's really similar to do studies with, and sometimes I do this and sometimes I just free hand and sometimes I make it realistic and sometimes it's not realistic. I just do a quick sketch. It doesn't matter as long as you're practicing seeing the subject in front of you. But whatever method you choose, I really recommend you don't use an eraser, because if you're using the eraser, it's going to slow you down, you're going to overthink it. These aren't here to be in a gallery, we're just practicing and I just want you to draw over any lines that you mess up, just keep drawing. Another great tip for observational drawings is to look at your subject more than your paper. If you look at your subject for 5 seconds, look at your paper for two. Just try to jot down what you're seeing, but look at your subject more. This will force you to observe more than to fill in the blanks with your brain. We're going to be using our eyes instead of our brains. With this step one with shape, step two with adding the outlines and then when you're ready, you can add detail and shade in your subject. A great tip for seeing values when you want to shade is to squint your eyes and then you can see the lights and darks because they get grouped together and then you just do your best to render it that way. Try to see highlights, mid tones and shadows. It doesn't have to be perfect. Just try and you'll get better the more you do it. The subject I picked is a bell pepper and these are actually really shiny, so it's really fun to draw them, but your subject might not be as shiny as mine. That's okay. Just draw what you see in once you feel like you've got the essence of it and you're done just move on to a new pose. Change the angle of the subject in your hand, and then draw it that way. Here I did one from the top, which is very different from the other one. And it was more challenging because I never pay attention to bell peppers, especially at this angle and it looks a little weird, especially where the stem bends. This really forces me to watch and observe instead of think. When something is new to your brain, you're more likely to observe it than to fill in the blanks. This is something that we want to do. That's why it's important to pick an interesting subject that you don't really know what it looks like. Again, I did the sketch quickly and loosely, I did all three steps, basic shapes, the general outlines and then details and shading. Once it feels done and not perfect, just done, I move on to a new angle. I'm not doing these perfectly. Again, I'm not using an eraser and I'm being quick. As you can see, I made this pepper a little too narrow and it's okay, I just drew over it and I'm not embarrassed. I'm just practicing, so just do your best and don't worry, you can fix any mistakes by just drawing over it and just don't sweat it. We're just working on our hand-eye coordination. Just practice. Here's another fun way to do step three. Instead of jumping into shading, just like that, we can observe the outlines of the highlights and the shadows and instead draw them in first. This can make it easier to shade, especially if you're doing a realistic piece and you're taking your time, it's something you're going to frame. It's like a finished work. This can be such a good tool to have. I personally don't do this a lot, but I see a lot of artists that do and it looks really good. It's like making a coloring book page for where to add lights and darks and I'll admit it did make step three easier. This is actually very useful for complex subjects like portraits. That's it. Simple. As you can see, my peppers are not perfect, but that's not the goal I practiced observing and that's what's important since we weren't focused on technique or being perfect and just add quick studies, but did lots of them and I encourage you to do as many as you want. You also may not be aware of it, but you'll learn how to see something in 3D and this will really help you with your future drawings. Quick studies like these are seen a lot in figure drawing or drawing people. If you don't know how to draw quickly and fall behind, try using a one-minute, two-minute, five-minute timer for each angle of your subject, it will force you to loosen up if you really want to be loose, so you can try to capture just the gesture by doing them within a few seconds. Gesture drawing captures the essence of your subject, not the detail, and helps you to truly see and draw faster. It's not as observational as the other ways of drawing, but it can be really great for just putting down lines quickly. You just try to capture your subject with as few strokes as possible. This is similar to the style of ink painting called sumi-e, which is gorgeous. I personally love this style on. I tried to capture the essence of my subjects when I do things in my style a lot. Another way to observe is to do a contour drawing or a blind contour drawing. All of these exercises were in my C, better to draw better class and they're so easy to do. To do a normal contour study, we just focus on the outlines. Just draw the outline of your subject to the best of your ability. Look at your subject as if it's made up of lines and don't worry about the shading, just the lines that make up the subject. This is one of my favorite ways to draw and when you observe like this, it just try to fill out the edges of your subject. You can also do an outline continuously. A continuous contour drawing is when you draw the same thing and outline, but you don't lift the pen off the page as you focus on the outlines, this makes you focus on results less and you don't get slowed down, are tempted to stop, to erase or rethink. It will look a little sillier, but it forces you to observe. Now for my favorite, the most fun one, a blind continuous contour drawing. It's the same thing, but this time you don't look down at your page at all. You only look at the subject so you don t know what you're drawing. You just try to draw the outlines. You don't lift off your pen and you just keep going. This one is really fun to do and the results tend to look quite silly, but it really forces you to observe and you work on your hand-eye coordination a lot. These studies are fast and help you to be super aware of line. You can also do a value study, which is the opposite. Instead of focusing on line, we focus on value changes or lights and darks. It helps you to see the form of things you can do quick ones if you use charcoal. My favorite medium for this is charcoal, but you can use a normal pencil or even ink as long as you do like crosshatching or something to show lights and shadows, as long as you can show lighter areas and darker areas. You can even do watercolor, just painting with black or gouache or acrylic or anything you'd like to devalue studies with. These are more difficult than contour drawings, but they have a lot of benefits and they help you to see form in 3D and help you to learn how light and shadows work. There are just so many ways to do studies. Just find what you like to do the most and try practicing seeing in as many ways as you can until you find your favorite ways, even if it's not fun to practice you're learning and you are growing. Just do it for your art. I also encourage you to do studies from real life as often as you can and it doesn't matter what techniques you use as long as you study your subject more than your page. I really believed that drawing things from real life is most beneficial thing you can do to improve your art quickly because it makes you aware of how your subject is and you really have to observe. Now let's practice the second building block stylization. 9. Stylization: Now that we flex our observation muscle, we're well-equipped to play with what we see. The second building block is stylization. When we stylize we play with the information we observed and style depends a lot on the medium you choose and how you use that medium. I showed an example of this in my class in style with drawing a single outline, but finishing each one with different mediums and techniques. As you can see I barely scratched the surface because that can be infinitely unique, but each one felt different and fun and it really helps you to just see potential. Now let's move on to the main exercise. Grab any subject you want to play with, and let's do it. You can pick a fruit or vegetable again or you can pick something that you enjoy drawing like a flower. Don't be scared of grabbing something too complex with this one even if you're a beginner because it can be a nice challenge to stylize and to simplify. As for supplies, use anything you like and feel free to play. I chose broccoli and asparagus. Both are very interesting. Let's start with the asparagus. I'm going to focus on simplifying which is a great first step in stylizing. If you don't know where to start, start here. When we simplify, we're using a part of our brain that helps us to change information. This is part of stylizing, but if you want to make it even more of your own, you have to use imagination as well and just add stuff to it and play with things even more. I'm going to be using an ink brush pen with bristles, but you can use anything you like. A pencil is just fine too. I just personally really like ink. I like the finality of it and the natural line variation and texture. For this exercise, we're going to skip step 1 if putting down basic shapes. You will naturally make more wonky art if you don't and it'll be freeing for this exercise. Also, when you practice drawing without sketching, it builds confident line work. A lot of beginner artist draw the same line over and over again. It makes wonky-looking lines and it makes it look messy. The more you practice being final with one line the easier it will become and the more confident your lines will be, so just make your lines and live with them and love them as they are. Maybe that's advice for loving yourself too, maybe your perfect as you are. I'm going to draw the asparagus, I'm going to start by just simplifying. Notice how my lines [inaudible] all the way. Instead of drawing every single shape that I see I'm going to just draw the ones I like and just kind of wing it. I can leave things out or move things around if I think it'll look better. I can change the scale of things. I'm still studying my subject and being somewhat realistic here, but I have the artistic right to make the subject my own. By the way being realistic is a style as well. You can do anything you like. To practice simplifying, you just draw your subject still working quickly, but without every detail. Be selective with your details. In fact, the less detail, the more your subject is easy to look at. I honestly enjoy simplifying as much as I can, but maybe your style is complex. You can also practice adding more detail or maybe funky patterns. I just enjoy capturing the essence. Notice how I made this asparagas thicker and more rounded. I also mimicked how it looks inside, but I wasn't concerned with getting each line. Just like the reference, is that I did my own thing. I copied the pattern in my own way. It's very similar to the reference, but this is a really good skill because it gives you the freedom to play with what you see and make it simple even if it's very complex especially with patterns. I really liked the fun patterns, so I did a second study of the tip. Again, it doesn't look exactly like the reference, but you really can't tell because I'm observing and mimicking the reference. My simplification is so subtle that it still looks like asparagus. This is a useful skill to have when something has a lot of detail or a complex pattern. It's important to be able to simplify it and observe it enough to make it your own. This will help you from going crazy. [LAUGHTER] As you will see this broccoli, this time I'm using a Posca paint marker for uniform green lines. Now I will focus on stylizing more which just means making it my own. I will be inspired by the reference, but I will play with it more. There's just so much detail on all the little circles and if I tried to draw each one I go crazy, but broccoli can be stylized to the extreme and kept recognizable because we all know what broccoli looks like. It's just one thing in the whole world that looks like broccoli. I made it flowy with the lines and I [inaudible] conveyed a lot of information by simplifying it. Also took the head of the broccoli in these little half circles to show the outline. I used some lines and some places for the little details I saw and little circle spaced apart. This makes a fun pattern and I ended up filling in some [inaudible] stylistic choices. It doesn't matter that I went away from reality. You can still tell its broccoli, but it did make it more interesting to look at and easier to draw at the same time. My advice for stylizing is not to overthink it and just go for it. Add your own twist to things and it will get easier to do with time. If you're not sure something will look good, just try it and you'll learn if it does or doesn't. If you really want to draw a cartoony, just make it super simple. You can play with scale, you can play with line, you can play with anything you want to play with. Don't feel limited, just try different things and if it doesn't look good it's okay. Here's a second example with a different angle. This time I tried to add more texture and use squiggly lines to portray the dots and it still works. It still reads broccoli. That's because it's just that the shape is rooted in reality. The more you experiment with playing with what you see, the faster you'll find your own style and the easier it will be to stylize and just be playful and do what feels right to you. I really liked the result of my broccoli here. These were fun and I didn't go too far away from reality, but if you want to go far away from reality you can't. I just wanted to keep it simple for this class. Let's go back to the radish feature earlier. I'm going to show you how I do it in my own style. Usually when I stylize something and I keep it somewhat realistic, I quickly jot down the basic shapes and the trick here is to make it look better than real-life. Notice how I made the root part bigger and the leaves smaller. Like I said before playing with scale is a wonderful way to add your style. I just thought it looked better this way. If you move on to step 2 you start adding things like the leaves on the outlines, but I have a lot of experience drawing and like to do it loosely. I just do steps 2 and 3 at the same time with the medium I'll be finishing with. I don't like to be glued to my sketch, but this is just a technique I like to do over time. You don't have to do it. You can have five steps when you draw or you can have one. It's all up to you. I outlined everything in waterproof ink because it's one of my favorite mediums and it's something I've learned over time that I'd like to do and then just throw in some detail and some blue shading, and then I'm done with the ink. I just finished off the piece by adding color with watercolor which is also one of my favorite mediums. I'm still observing, but I'm very loose with it because the style that I enjoy painting with is to make it just whimsical. I can look at my page more than the reference at this stage. We're now working on observing here, we're stylizing, so we're just having fun with the subject. At this stage, your page is your best friend unless you're going for extreme realism, I'm just doing what I want to do, but it looks good and believable because I studied the radish. I'm inspired by reality and in my experience most good artworks even if they're super, super cartoony and childish, they're usually inspired by the real-world. Notice how loose my brush strokes were and the funny little background makes the whole radish pop. It's also way more colorful than it is in real-life. When you know how to truly observe, you can take reality and make it your own. This is the style I enjoy the most. My biggest advice to finding your style is also to do what you enjoy doing the most, being in the moment, experimenting, and playing with your supplies, line, shape, and so forth. In fact try lots of different supplies as many as you can get your hands on even if you have to borrow from a friend and bring it back. Finding your style takes time, but as long as it's rooted in observation you can go as wild as you want. Going back to the strawberry example, I encourage you to also try doing something like this. It doesn't have to be strawberries, it can be any subject you like, like a doughnut or a leaf or a flower, or just a circle. Just sketch out the same basic shapes many times and then fill it in with lots of different styles and lots of different mediums. This is a quick way to find what you enjoy doing the most and what you think looks the best. It's also a great way to learn how to experiment and try many techniques very quickly. I think of this as a fundamental challenge. My other advice for finding your style is to collect inspiring art from other people and to study it. Find your favorite artists, and become a fan, but don't ever copy one particular person because that's morally wrong and boring. You should have many different favorite artists and you should be inspired by your heroes. You can learn a lot from your art heroes and take what you learn and put your own twist on it and make it something different. You can also make copies of their work just to study how they did things, but don't share it on social media or with anybody really because copying someone else and sharing it is wrong, but you can copy other people especially the old masters to get better at what you do and to learn from them but this is just for you to study. Don't become a copy of them, but learn from them. Now that we've talked about style, let's move on to memorization. 10. Memorization: Now let's talk about the building block number 3, memorization. So far I've drawn for vegetables and I'm going to put my memory to the test. I'm going to draw each one without looking at them. I promise I didn't cheat. If this is hard for you to do, that's only because you haven't practiced this skill yet. So don't worry about it in practice. I don't care how old you are, science shows that memory is something that can be improved at any age. Hopefully by practicing this with drawing, you'll have a better imagination and memory in real life. This is also how some of your favorite artists make up things as they draw. They've drawn the same subject over and over again to the point of memorization. This is an important skill even if you use references every time because it gives you more creatively way to play with the reference and keep it believable or completely draw from your imagination, which is a goal for many people and is totally achievable with practice. This is how I did, not bad. I was honestly impressed since I never draw asparagus or broccoli and this is just from onetime of drawing it. I did this exercise the next day too. I didn't think I could do it to be honest, but hey, I remember, but you don't have to wait till the next day. You can do it right after your draw to practice your short-term memory. Then you can wait till the next day to practice your long-term memory. Our memory is actually pretty great and it gets better with practice. Let's test it out with a fun worksheet. Download the worksheet and print out two copies. You'll see why in a second and let's do it together. Don't be intimidated by this exercise. I'm sure you'll do better than you think. This time we're using references so we can all see the same subject at the same angles. Just pause the video on each reference image and fill out your block by observing it. You can be realistic if you want, but it's much faster to simplify what you see and it's easier to memorize that too. But always observe as much as you can even when you simplify. Do this quickly and don't be a perfectionist. Be sure to pause the video at each vegetable so you can take your time in drawing them. As you can see, I use the skills we learned earlier. I sketch out the simple shapes first and then I inked it in. You can also use a pencil for all of these, any medium is just fine. It's time for some veggie jokes. I bet you can guess this one. What do you call someone who raps about beets, a beat boxer. [NOISE] Oh come on, that wasn't so bad. That's it for the beat. Now here's the garlic. It's a little bit more complex, but just do your best. This isn't a test, just practice. I also really like the shape of the clove. You can draw that too if you like. What do you call someone who was raised by garlic? I'll give you a second to think. Garlic breed. [NOISE] Oh, come on, that one was funny. [LAUGHTER] Fine. No more jokes. Now let's do the mushroom. These are quite simple and fun. Just draw the outlines. Now for the piece, these are more quirky for sure and there's more information to memorize, but just do your best. Now the pumpkin, it's at an angle but don't overthink it, just observe, you can do this, I believe in you. To make it easier to draw for myself, I sketched out an oval and then another one where all the lines meet. Just always start with basic shapes and you can do anything you want. Now it's time for corn. I'm sorry guys, but I have a corny joke. I can't hold back it's corn. What did the baby corn say to the mama corn? Where's popcorn? [LAUGHTER] All right, fine. I'm done. I quit my comedian career. [APPLAUSE]. Oh, come on. Whatever. You can see I made the whole thing a sideways rectangle and then filled it in, simple shapes always win. I also use my observing and simplifying skills for the patterns. I wouldn't have the patience to observe every single piece of corn so I just did a bunch of ovals. Simplifying patterns like this is such an important skill to have. That's it for the worksheet. Good job in doing it in practicing observation. Now, get out your second worksheet. Hide this one and any photos of vegetables and let's do the whole thing again but this time from memory. If you want to, you can just look at your page and try to commit to memory each shape that you drew. But I bet you will remember. Again, this is not a test, so just do your best. I believe in you, you can do this and you will benefit a lot from this exercise. Here is where you pause. You did it. I bet you did better than you think. If you find this super challenging, don't worry about it. You just need more practice. Our memory skill can grow very quickly and gets better with practice and time and maybe just got some of them right in some not right. Just pat yourself on the back for the ones you got right. Don't worry about it again. Now let's compare results. I use colorful fine liner pencils for this exercise because I had them. I never use them for anything. So I now play with colors. My beet turned out pretty accurate and I couldn't help adding a face and sparkles to it because it just looked cute. My garlic also look just right, in a surprise I got the clove right. That's an interesting shape. The mushroom looks pretty good. Not perfect but good enough. Now for the peas, I forgot the shapes and ended up being really cartoony. But that's okay. I still got the gist of it. The pumpkin. I forgot it wasn't an angle. Actually, I think I remembered but I just forgot how to draw it at an angle. [LAUGHTER] That's okay. I ended up making it straight on. I also wanted to play with this simple pattern in it. It's not like the last drawing, but hey, it looks like a pumpkin. I'd say that's a pass. Be gentle with yourself too. My corn was pretty accurate, but I couldn't remember how the leaves around it looks, so I winged it and they look pretty believable to me. When I compare both worksheets, as you can see each drawing isn't an exact copy, but the important things are there. They're all recognizable for what they are. Even if your drawings are a bit wonky, don't worry about it. We're just practicing memorizing. This isn't a graded tests in school so relax and enjoy the creative ride. If your results were bad, that just means you need to practice the skill more. So just take time every day to practice memorizing and you'll get better, whatever your results are, good job for practicing and don't worry, there'll be a fun challenge at the end of the class. It will help you to practice even more. Now let's talk about imagination. 11. Imagination: You might be wondering why imagination is not a building block. The reason is because it is built by doing the other three. We don't draw from a vacuum. Everything you draw from imagination starts with observation. When we observe, we build our visual library to get imagination from, or you can call it your visual vocabulary. When we stylize, we use imagination to change things, and when we memorize, we recall that visual library and build the strength of this muscle that is used to draw from imagination, because without recalling things, you can't draw off your imagination. The more you can recall what something looks like, the more you can play with it. Imagination is so important with drawing and is developed with all three steps. You can take it one step further and try doodling or painting abstracts or just draw from your imagination and just make things up even if it looks wonky, which also is imagination. But this doesn't utilize the three building blocks. Drawing or painting intuitively in the moment and making things up in the moment, it's a different skill set from what we're focusing on in this class, but it's also super fun. It just takes practice in that specific skill to get better at it. In this class, we're focusing more on realistic drawings and drawing from real life and from inspiration from the real world. For example, if you want to draw a bunny from your imagination, make it super collider and stylized, you still have to observe a bunny first. But if you want to paint completely abstract, imagination is a completely different skill set for you and you should just practice painting abstract. But like I said before, with the Picasso example, it's good to master the basics first and then feel free to draw or paint in any way you feel led to, unless you already know that that's what you want to do. Imagination is something that is developed anytime you draw anything, whether you stylize it or not. But if you want to make it grow even faster, play with style even more and try to make up scenes or characters when you feel comfortable. It takes time to get to, but the more you practice it, the better you get at it. But if you focus on the basics first, it becomes easier. Like I said before, you're not going to be able to draw people from memory or imagination until you study a lot of references. So if you want to make the most of your time, study those first and then play later. But you can, of course, play as you study. I always have. Just don't set unrealistic expectations. Memorization and imagination take time to develop. But remember they're all based on observation. So just focus on seeing first and then play with what you see. But it will come with time. Your style will come with time. Just be patient. My advice for finding your style, growing your imagination, and your drawing skills is to play, experiment and try new things as you learn. Take risks, do something hard, just do your best, and keep growing creatively. You will learn from every experiences. Be fearless and be bold. As you grow, all your skills will grow with you. Don't worry about it too much and just keep playing. If you think you don't have an imagination, trust me, you do, it just takes practice. So just be playful when you create. Now, let's really challenge ourselves and draw something a little bit more complex. 12. A Bigger Challenge: Now that we learned about the three building blocks, let's do a real challenge. Drawing just one subject is great, but for it to be really hard to do, it's even better to put lots of subjects together into a more complex scene. In this way, you have to compare the scale of things, pay attention to how they overlap, what they look like together, how far apart they are. You have more contrast. Essentially, there's a lot more for your brain to process. You are forced to observe and to build your spatial awareness skill. I'm going to be drawing a vegetable and I'm going to stylize it with markers, but mostly keep to the realism of the shapes. You can pick any subject you want. Make a still life with lots of random things around the house or you can do a fruit or vegetable like me. Whatever you want to do, just have objects overlap. The most important part is to draw from life. But if you don't want to set up a scene for whatever reason, I did provide you with a reference that you can download of a scene very similar to mine, but you won't learn as much if you draw from a reference. So use whatever medium you like and you have the choice of either stylizing what you see or drawing it realistically. You will learn more from drawing it realistically, but it will also take longer. I personally enjoy stylizing a lot and I want to get better at using markers and colors. So that's what I'll be doing. Whether you draw realistically or stylized, just practice observing. You can also focus on what you're weaker in. If observing is hard, just practice observing realistically. But if stylizing is hard then try to stylize. Let me just quickly show you how I did mine and then I want you to draw your scene in the way you choose. Remember that if it's hard, it just means you're learning a lot, so don't run away from a challenge and just face it. Even if your drawing looks wonky at the end, it's fine, you're just building your skills. You can share what you make, but you don't have to, so no pressure. So I use blue lead to keep my sketch light and even if I don't erase it, it will still look nice. I started out with basic shapes first drawing the bowl. Maybe I can't see its outline completely, but I know it's an oval. Then I start placing things inside it. So I'm going from basic shapes. I'm trying to keep all my shapes as basic as they can be. This is the easy way of plotting where things go. Just pay attention to where things overlap. I can draw on it where a detail goes if it's more complex, but overall, I'm keeping it very simple for step 1. This is one of those times where I skip step 2, and I go in with my chosen medium of alcohol marker to finalize. But if you're a beginner artist you might want to sketch out step 2 as well. This is a skill I've gotten with practice and I like the wonkier look of my lines without a perfect sketch to go off of. I like to keep my drawings alive, but that's just my style. So in this example, I was doing my seven-day challenge and I didn't do so well. I didn't put things where they're supposed to be to overlap. I noticed like, oh, this shape should be here, this shape should be there but I just continued with it and I just did it anyway. So don't overthink it and just practice. But I know that I got stronger in drawing and observing just by doing this exercise. I went in and drew what I saw and sometimes I simplified a lot and sometimes I stylized and sometimes I kept realistic so I liked it. So as you can see, I use the same technique with the broccoli that I did earlier because thought it looked cool. I also thought the radish leaves were very interesting looking so I tried to keep their essence. But I don't have to copy every single line and stare at it for hours, I can make my own. When I drew my bell pepper, I realized it was too small and narrow, but that's okay, this is the same thing I did earlier. I don't know why I'm doing this, but it's okay. Just keep going. I simplified and shortened the asparagus and I had fun drawing the garlic bulb. It's very interesting looking, almost like flower petals in some ways. Added some yellow to make everything more fun and this was more experimental and I'm not sure if I like the results, but hey, the more you experiment, the more you find fun things you can do. That's how you get your style. I added a light blue checkered pattern for the table for another fun touch, and I love the sketchy lines I used to fill it in. The ciliary was also fun to draw. This was mostly observation and simplification. I know it looks complicated, but just remember it's just lines and shapes, nothing fancy. You can also change the shape of things and play with it. I added some stars and sparkles to the background and a loose shadow to the bowl. These aren't based on reality, but they're fun in my style. Then I went in with pink and added shadows with it everywhere even if it's not realistic. I just wanted it to look nice. I'm almost done, but it felt like the piece was a little too light and needed more contrast. So from my previous experience, I knew that was the problem and I took a darker color and re-outlined random parts and I finally felt like it was done. When making this piece, I practice all three skills. Observation, because I observed, stylization because I made some things my own, and memorization. You may wonder, where is memorization? Well, the broccoli, the way I did it before, I did again, and also the way I did the shading, I didn't really look at the reference and I just knew how light works in some ways and even just looking at a reference for a second and then looking back at my page and drawing what I just remembered is memorization. All these skills go together and the more you work on them, the better your art will be, and the easier it will be to make art. Your turn. Don't stress out and just do your best. You are not in school, you're not being graded and you don't have to share what you make if you don't want to. This is just for you to practice. Don't worry about how the results look and when you're ready, I have a final challenge that will kick start your drawing habit and help you to level up all your skills. Let's get into the seven-day drawing challenge. 13. The 7 Day Challenge: Becoming an artist doesn't happen with just one exercise one time thinking it's too hard and maybe not trying again. You have to face and master the challenges which takes time. You also have to be consistent with practice which is probably the most important thing you can do as an artist. Every artist out there that makes gorgeous work had to put in tons of hours to master their craft and they're still mastering it even now. This is why I made the seven-day challenge to help you get that good practice time in because not all practice is created equal. This challenge is all about practicing the three building blocks of drawing. I encourage you to download the worksheet and then print it out so you can track your progress if you accept it, date it, sign it and pick a reward. Yes, I cared for you to look forward to. It can be simple as having a night to yourself and taking a hot bath or getting a fancy massage or maybe just eating some ice cream and watching movies, do whatever works for you. I picked playing The Sims 4 for a day because I haven't had much time to play games lately and I miss it. I'm writing this in the future when I already finished the challenge and boy, was it fun to have a day to PSMs potato? I felt like I earned it. The reason I want you to sign it is because making a commitment to yourself can help you to finish it. You don't have to do seven days straight, you can skip a day or two or three and just jump back in. No guilt and no stress. We just want to commit to practicing all we learned for seven days. I did this challenge during the holidays, so I skipped a day here and there for myself because I had to and you're very busy too so it's okay if you do. The less stress you put on yourself, the more likely you are to finish. Just have fun. Here's how to do this challenge. Pick subjects at either challenge you or that you want to get better at drawing. Depending on what you pick, you might use references from the Internet if you want to draw birds for example and get good at drawing them, it's hard to do that from your life unless you have a realistic sculpture. I recommend doing at least three days of drawing from life, whether you go to a park or set up a small still-life scene or even if you do a self-portrait, anything you want to do from this life, just draw from life as much as you can. But don't overthink it. The subjects don't have to be things you want to study, they can be just things you want to observe and could be things that you've never drawn before. I ended up doing three still lives and then three from references of things I liked and then I finish with one more still-life. The still lives really beat my buds sometimes but it was good practice. Each day once you choose a subject or a reference, do each exercise in order to check them off and rate the difficulty of each one from 1-10. Just do your best to rate it, this is just a reference for you. The goal of this is to show you that as you practice these skills, they get easier. It also helps you to see where your weaknesses are and where your strengths are and what exercises you should spend more time on. It also helps you to see what subjects are easier and harder for you to draw. Let's quickly go over each exercise to remind you of how to do them properly. When we observe, we pay attention to what we truly see instead of what we think we see think in terms of line, shape and value, instead of the name of the subject. It's okay if your observational drawings look bad just pay attention to really seeing and don't worry about results. It's better to have an ugly drawing rooted in observation then have a pretty one using shortcuts in the brain because we want to practice seeing and not drawing perfectly that's what stylizing is for. Once we truly observe our subject, we can stylize it. Like I said before if you're completely unsure of how to stylize, just start by simplifying and being choosy with what details you include. You can ask, pay attention to the outlines and maybe play with scale and the form and making more pleasing to the eye and you can play with fun colors and supplies, whatever you want to do, maybe even simplify to the extreme or add a lot of detail or play with the fun medium or change up the colors. This step is where creativity rains and imagination can play, but try to be inspired by the subject that you are studying. This is where you can let your brain play with what you see. When I did my challenge, I tried to be as inspired by the subject as I could be and I kept it more closer to reality. But you can go as crazy as you want to. Next, we're going to practice memorization, hide your subject in any draws you have of it and try to draw it from memory. You can draw it what the style you just did or realistically just try to remember how it looked and draw it out. It doesn't have to be perfect. In fact, the step is usually the quickest, just simple sketches will do. We're just practicing using the memorization part of our brain. Usually drawing the ones with style is easier and you remember those more. If you want to really help yourself try to commit them to memory before flipping the page. If your memorization drawings really suck, that just means you need more practice. Everyone's memory can be improved no matter what age science tells us this. Don't worry, you can do this. Maybe you look at your subject one more time, try to commit it to memory and then try again. There are no rules. Just practice. The more you practice, the faster you'll improve. In fact, for myself, the more I did the memorization exercise, the more I felt like I could visualize things in my mind, it really helped my imagination. When I close my eyes and meditated on something, I could actually see it. I know it sounds strange to improve in seven days but I really did. This muscle isn't something I worked on much in the past so it was cool to see these improvements. All the exercises build on each other and work together and there'll be invaluable to you when you want to draw anything. Once you're done with the worksheet, be sure to reward yourself and reflect back on how you did and maybe write some notes down, for example, if you're weak in observation, write that down so you can practice them more in the future. I encourage you to do the seven-day challenge whenever you want to improve and hopefully it will snowball to drive more consistently and maybe joining into a drawing or painting challenge.They have tons of prompts online like Inktober and honestly, they're going on every month. There are lots of artists that are doing them. The more you practice, the better you get and practice like this where we work on specific skills is the best, especially if you're a beginner or if you're an advanced artist, that's rusty. You can do a seven-day challenge in any subject matter you like. If you want to just use references, you can, like I said before, drawing from life has more benefits. For example, you can focus on just drawing hands if that's what your weakness is or faces if you want a true challenge, maybe seven days of just self-portraits. Anything you want to do, just keep practicing. The more you draw, the easier it will be and the more fun you'll have and you'll learn how to be in the flow state. The next lesson is me going over how you did in the challenge, but you've pretty much made it to the end. Amazing work you guys and remember to keep practicing and stay consistent. I wish you the best of luck in your challenge and I can't wait to see your results if you do decide to share. 14. How I Did: It's time to see you how I did on the seven-day challenge. Well, first off, I want to say, I suck at drawing challenges. I wish I didn't, but I don't know what it is. Every time I start one, I quit. Guess what you guys, it's embarrassing but this is the first one I ever finished. I really wanted to make it easy and simple for anyone to do and it really worked for me and I hope it works for you. Having those stress of doing consecutive days and make need only seven days long, made it so much more doable for me. If you want to make it a month long, you can just do this challenge four times, breaking it up into 70 chunks with rewards every seven days. It makes it so much more doable. If you're anything like me, I hope this really helps you to finish, and the best part is results aren't important. The only important part is just putting in the practice time. I think seeing me suck at drawing will help you to not be self-conscious with your drawings. Let's quickly see how I did on the challenge spoiler alert, this challenge made me realize I need more practice. I've been feeling pretty rusty because I focused on drawing only cute animals for pretty much almost a year for my book. This was exactly what I needed. I also want to point out I didn't use basic shapes most of the time I free handed. That's one of the reasons I failed so much. I really wanted to work on my free handing skill, but it's a lot harder. You're free to use basic shapes the whole time. In fact, I encourage you to, if you're a beginner. Just do whatever you want to do for this challenge. For Day 1, I chose roses in a vase because I had the fresh flowers and they're one of my favorite things to draw. I got an angle that I liked and did a blind contour for observation. Again, this means I did not look down at my page at all. I only looked at the subject and I didn't lift my pen while drawing the outlines of everything I see. It's okay normal for things to overlap as well. I didn't really get to draw the vase, but that's okay. This really forced me to observe. Like I said before, the results look really wonky, and then I stylus my subject. This time I included the vase and I just use these watercolor brush pens and drew it quickly, just playing with what I see. I changed the shape of the vase so that it would fit on the page. Notice how I made the dots with only a few instead of including them all, which is similar to what I do with the broccoli earlier. This was loose and quick. In my usual style, I really simplified the flowers. For memorization, I try to draw everything I can remember. I feel like I could have done better here, but it was still not bad. I did pretty good with the flower shapes and the petals. I rated myself a two for observing and stylizing because it was pretty easy and a four for memorizing because it was a little harder to remember everything. The next day I did a ceramic shoe and I put roses in it because why not get better at drawing them. There are no rules when you pick subjects, you can do the same one again, just do what you want to. This time observing was very easy for the roses, but felt a little harder with the shoe. I think I did pretty well, but I felt like it was challenging so I gave it a four, and then stylizing was easy like always so I gave it a two. Notice how I just use half the page. You can do whatever you want. If you don't have that much time that day, make them smaller. If you have a lot of time, you can do two full pages or three per thing. Notice how I really play with the shape of the shoe and I try to play more with the roses. Memorization was hard, I'm not going to lie. I messed up the shape of the shoe. It looks pretty wonky so I gave it a six, but it was still not terrible. All that matters is I practice. Day 3 was this cute little scene with ornaments and fabric, and I observed it with a ballpoint pen. I didn't spend forever on it and try to get the gist of it, but it was pretty difficult. I guess I have to work in my spatial awareness skill because I kept putting things in the wrong places and they overlapped in the wrong way. This was a bad drawing day in my opinion, and I rated observation as six, but it's okay, I practice and then I stylize again. It was pretty hard and it didn't look the way I wanted to. It was childish I rated it at a seven, but that's okay. The funny thing is animals are usually the easiest for me to draw, but for whatever reason, it just wasn't that day. I don't know if it's because of the wonky shapes of the ornaments, because they are already simplified. But we all have good days and bad days. As for memorizing I rated it a five because it was hard, but same time I think I did pretty good, especially with the angel. Day 4 was going away from real-life observation and just using references because I wanted to study birds, which is one of my favorite subjects. I started out with charcoal and then I try pencil and switch to ink. There are no rules for what medium to use. Do whatever you want, but mixing it up helps to keep it fresh. But at the end of the day, ink is my favorite mediums for outlines. I wrote down the names of the birds to help me remember them for the future and I had a lot of fun with these because I love drawing birds. I give observing a three, which was pretty easy. Then I moved on to stylizing, which also went great and in fact felt way too easy since I already I draw birds a lot. I also added some color with alcohol markers because why not and I gave it a two. If you have a two-page spread like this and want to practice memorization, just cover your other page and you're good to go. Memorization went pretty okay, but I felt like I got some of the poses wrong and could only draw stylized birds instead of realistic ones so I gave it a five. This is definitely my weakest spot. Day 5 was my favorite. I studied references of flowers and it went really well. I studied them with colored pencil and labeled them for more fun. It was pretty easy so I gave it a two, and then I took oil pastels and play with style with them, with the same flowers and I love how they turned out. I actually gave this a one because it was super easy. Memorizing also went surprisingly well, and I gave it a two. I think I was pretty accurate with the flowers and leaf shapes. Again, drawing flowers is the easiest because I have the most practice with it. The more you draw a certain subject, the better you get at it, and the easier it gets. When I first started drawing flowers, it was not this easy. Day 6 is foxes, and for some reason, it's always been a little hard for me to draw this specific animal. Observation was a three, but then stylization was a hit or miss. I tried to be very playful with how I did things and some of these are cute and some are not. I gave it a five, but I want to say that I experimented a lot and that's great for finding what works well and what doesn't. Experimentation is more important than results. Just play a lot when you practice and when you do a serious piece, you will have a better idea of what looks good and what doesn't. The memorization portion felt very hard. In fact, all the results were super cartoony. I had another bad drawing day and give this one a seven. Again, memorization is the hardest for me, but it's okay. I really should have tried to commit the shapes memory more, but studying a more complex subject like animal anatomy or people, takes time to memorize, so no stress. For Day 7, I went back to his still life and pick some interesting-looking subjects. I didn't do so good on the lady praying, but it was fun studying the panda in 3D. I gave this one a six because it was challenging, but I did try to make the angles interesting, which made it harder, but awesome and improve more. Stylizing, on the other hand, was super fun. I especially like how the unicorns turned out and I gave it a three, memorizing was easier than I thought and I got most of the shapes right except the hands, but I barely study hands. That's no surprise since every artist complains about how hard they are to draw. Notice how I remembered the shapes of the hair curls because they're really stood out to me and they make a cool texture I can use in the future. I gave it a four because it was mildly challenging. That's it for my seven-day challenge. As you can see, it's not about the results. Some of mine look terrible, but I'm I a worse artist because of that? No, I was just practicing, and guess what? I was proud of myself for finishing and I had a blast taking the day off to play the sims for it. My drawings after the challenge improved immediately and it was so noticeable. The rusty of feeling also went away. It's almost like I let myself make ugly art and stop feeling so intimidated and afraid to mess up my real pieces. I also realized where I needed to practice more, which is drawing animals realistically and doing more or less studies of interesting objects. I also need to practice memorization. I also realized I am really good at drawing flowers and birds, but I can practice memorizing birds more. This is why it's important to fill out the worksheet and analyze it afterwards. It helps us to see our shrinks and weak points. I encourage you to do this challenge as often as you can, maybe once a month and you can do any subject you like. Maybe just focus on birds or landscapes. It's okay if you just use references, as long as you do life studies from time to time, you can get better fast if you do this. I personally will do it again next time I feel rusty because of how good the experience was and how quickly I got back into being in the flow state and not being afraid of my drawings. Sometimes feeling rusty can be a really bad feeling, can feel like art block and this is a great way to overcome that. Now let's finish off the class. 15. Goodbye! :): Great work. You've finished the class. I hope you followed along with the exercises and started your seven-day challenge or will soon. Remember, the only way to improve is to practice. For the class project you can share anything you want to, whether it's the seven-day challenge images, or the exercises that we did, or you can do a journal entry of every day of your experience without sharing your drawings. If you want to, you can just talk about your strengths and weaknesses and things you learned, or even tiny snippets of drawings you do like. You don't have to share them all if you don't want to. Anything you feel comfortable sharing is good. But I encourage you to not to be afraid of sharing ugly art because it's completely normal, as you can see with my drawings, and I'm no less of an artist because I feel the drawing foxes. I had more than one bad drawing day and it happens to everyone. I hope this makes you less afraid of being a failure and making ugly work. I also hope it silences the voice of your inner critic. Just have fun and grow and explore and play, and of course, practice. Practice all these skills and whatever you're weak in practice more, and try doing the seven-day challenge multiple times for the most improvement. I hope you enjoyed this class. I'll see you in the next one. In the meantime, I have 20 other classes that you can check out. The one that I recommend the most is, see better to draw better, to learn more about some of the drawing exercises I shared, and I also include a lot more in that class. Another one I recommend is my you can draw anything class, if you want to practice doing three simple steps. I have a lot of other classes on many subjects and mediums from watercolor to gouache, and there are thousands more from other great teachers out there. I encourage you to never stop learning or growing. This is the final goodbye. Take care and stay awesome. Keep drawing and keep playing and keep experimenting, keep growing.