Learn To Draw: 5 Fun Exercises To Develop Line Drawing Confidence | Mel Rye | Skillshare
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Learn To Draw: 5 Fun Exercises To Develop Line Drawing Confidence

teacher avatar Mel Rye, ✎ Artist + Educator

Watch this class and thousands more

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Taught by industry leaders & working professionals
Topics include illustration, design, photography, and more

Watch this class and thousands more

Get unlimited access to every class
Taught by industry leaders & working professionals
Topics include illustration, design, photography, and more

Lessons in This Class

    • 1.

      Introduction

      2:38

    • 2.

      Class Project

      2:20

    • 3.

      What is Confident Drawing?

      4:16

    • 4.

      Tools + Materials

      2:42

    • 5.

      Subject Matter

      5:36

    • 6.

      Confident Drawing Mindset

      3:54

    • 7.

      Warm Up: Develop Your Line Language

      7:09

    • 8.

      Exercise 1: Blind Drawing

      10:40

    • 9.

      Exercise 2: Non Dominant Hand

      5:36

    • 10.

      Exercise 3: Hand, Body, Paper + Pen Position

      7:38

    • 11.

      Exercise 4: Playing With Scale

      9:30

    • 12.

      Exercise 5: Speed Drawing

      8:06

    • 13.

      What Next?

      6:12

    • 14.

      Thank You!

      2:31

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About This Class

Whether you draw for relaxation or are a professional artist or designer, being able to draw confidently can really transform your art, and how you feel about it.

Developing confidence in your line drawing is a skill which can be learned in the same way as any other drawing skill. My name is Mel Rye and I have taught drawing to beginners and more advanced students for over 15 years, and in this class, I’m going to walk you through a series of fun and simple drawing exercises ive tried and tested to help you develop greater confidence in your line drawing. 

W H A T   Y O U   W I L L  L E A R N

Together, we will:

  • examine what confidence in line drawing is and how to cultivate it 
  • explore the best materials to use, and subject matter to draw, to encourage confident drawing 
  • develop a toolkit of exercises you can return to again and again to keep that line drawing confidence going in your future projects.

    These will include:
    • Blind Drawing
    • Non Dominant Hand
    • Hand, Body, Paper and Pen Positioning
    • Playing with Scale
    • Speed Drawing

In this class, we will not cover technical drawing skills like proportion, perspective or shading - what we will encourage is your way of drawing which is fun, expressive and uniquely yours. These exercises can also help you to identify drawing methods you may fall in love with which can also help you on the road to developing your own unique drawing style.

W H A T   Y O U   W I L L   N E E D 

You don’t need any special materials to take the class - whatever you have at home will work really well - Just a pen and a few sheets of paper will be just fine!

Whether you’re a complete beginner looking for a fun class to get you started, or a seasoned artist who loves to explore different drawing methods, this class has something for you.

I’m so excited to see you develop some fun and confident line drawings - Let’s draw!

Meet Your Teacher

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Mel Rye

✎ Artist + Educator

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Level: Beginner

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Transcripts

1. Introduction: Drawing can be so much fun. It's also a great way to relax and amazing communication tool, and it's an essential skill if you want to work in the creative industries. Hi, I'm Mel, and I'm an illustrator, artist, and teacher. I have over 15 years experience of teaching drawing. In my experience, the number one issue that holds people back from making their best work and enjoying it is confidence. In this class, I'm going to walk you through a series of fun and simple line drawing exercises that I've tried and tested with students over many years that have really helped them to develop better line drawing confidence. Together, we're going to start by examining what confidence in line drawing is, what it might look like, and how to cultivate it. We'll explore the best materials to use and the subject matter to pick to encourage more confident drawing. Next, we'll discuss some habits that can help put you in the best possible mindset to draw with confidence. We'll warm up by exploring your drawing materials. We'll then work through a toolkit of drawing exercises together, which we'll explore different ways of encouraging you to draw more confidently. If you're brand new to drawing or you haven't picked up a pencil in years, then this class is a great low-pressure foundation from which to start building your drawing skills and having some fun. If you're a beginner keen to build killer drawing skills, then this class is going to equip you with some tools that will be amazing complement to those more technical sides of learning to draw. If you're a seasoned artist or illustrator, then this class would be a great workout for your drawing skills. It can really help you to just let go and have fun, particularly if you're feeling a bit stuck in a rut or you feel like you've hit a creative block. This class really is for everyone because everyone can draw. In this class, we will not be covering technical drawing skills like proportion, shading, or perspective. By the end of this class, you will have a toolkit of drawing exercises that you can return to you again and again whenever you feel you need to freshen things up. Whether you draw for fun and relaxation or whether you're a professional illustrator, being able to draw confidently can absolutely transform your art and how you feel about it. If you're ready, let's draw. 2. Class Project: For the class project, you're going to be following along with me as I walk you through a series of line drawing exercises. The drawings that you create for each exercise, is your project. The exercises that we're going to work through together are, blind drawing, drawing with your non-dominant hand, hand, body, paper, and pen positioning, playing with scale, and speed drawing. By giving you these limitations I'm taking away some control. These exercises will separate you a little bit from your drawings, giving you permission to just have fun and just make a mess. For each exercise, I'll explain exactly what to do and how the exercise is going to help you in developing better line drawing confidence. I'll be right there with you, drawing alongside you, and sharing all my useful hints and tips along the way. Once we've completed each exercise we'll reflect on what we've produced, and perhaps some qualities that you might like to adopt into your regular drawing practice. The exercises are fun, quick, and simple. The supplies are basic, and these constraints can help you really just let go of what you feel your drawings should look like, and they can lead to some really surprising results. In this class, since we're aiming to help you develop better line drawing confidence, it's absolutely up to you how many of these experiments you share in your class project. If you draw something that you really don't like, don't feel pressured to include it. Although sometimes other people can see some nuggets of gold in drawings that we just can't see. Feel free to upload the good, the bad, and the ugly too. Progress is never pretty, but there's no pressure either way. It is entirely up to you. Please consider leaving some encouraging comments on other student's projects too. This will spark some creative ideas for you, but it provides also so much value for them. A supportive creative community is after all why we're all here, and leaving a positive comment on someone's project can just absolutely make their day. We'll be discussing more about materials you'll need, choosing your subject matter, and some other ways to prepare for starting your drawings in the next videos. But first, we're going to take a look at what confident drawing is and how we can encourage it. When you're ready, join me in the next video. 3. What is Confident Drawing?: Learning the drawing fundamentals such as proportion, perspective, or how best to represent shading or texture are, of course, part of the learning's rule journey. But in my experience, I've found that you can have all of the technical skills, but if you just lack confidence in your drawing, your drawings just won't have that spark and vibrancy of an artist who maybe doesn't have all your technical skills but somehow just manages to make really exciting and engaging drawings. What does confident drawing look like and how can we make our drawings look more confident? Let's have a look in more detail to break it down and maybe take away a list of confident drawing rules that we can apply to your drawings throughout this class. Notice the choice of media. Using media that you can't erase forces you to draw more confidently because you have to just go for it. Less confident drawers will often pick a pencil as their medium of choice, and this makes sense because you'll want to erase any mistakes. But actually, this is the worst media to choose to encourage confidence in your drawing. Next, let's have a look at the line quality. A less confident drawing often has a feathery or hairy quality to it. As you move your hand back and forth as you draw, to show more confidence in your drawing, try to just use one really nice fluid movements to your drawing. We'll do a bit more practice with this when we do some warm-ups. Something else that you might notice in less-confident drawing is the object having multiple outlines. Sometimes that happens if we didn't get it right the first time, we, maybe go over it again. But sometimes it also happens if we did get the outline right the first time, but maybe we're just avoiding moving onto those more tricky and challenging parts of the drawing. Just outline your drawing once and commit to that, even if it's not right the first time. Now, I know that this can be really tricky for us if it doesn't come naturally. The drawing exercises that we're going to do will help us with that. But also remember, you can do these drawing exercises as many times as you like. Feel free to repeat them as often as you want to. Next, create multiple drawings of the same object. There's a couple of reasons for this. There's a big assumption that if you're good at drawing, you just get it right first time. This is absolutely not true. Let's look at the example of Quentin Blake, a really fantastic, successful, and talented illustrator. He's spoken in interviews often of his process to create his work, which actually involves doing the same scene and the same drawing several times, and then he'll pick the one that he likes best. Even if you draw the same thing from the same angle in the same medium, it's never going to come out exactly the same twice. Another reason to draw the same thing multiple times is that the more you draw something, the better you get to know it, and the more you know the object, the more confident you're going to feel representing it in a drawing. This is why you might notice that particular artists or illustrators will draw the same or very similar things. For example, they might be really known for doing portraits, or figure drawing, or plants, or animals, for example, is because they have become very comfortable drawing these things because they draw them often. Here's our set of confident drawing rules. Use a medium that you can't erase. Hairy lines are banned. Just outline your object once and commit to it. Create multiple drawings of the same thing. Most importantly, don't overthink it, don't judge, and just have fun. If you can follow these rules as you draw, you'll already be on the road to making your drawings look more confident. In the next video, we're going to take a look at the tools and materials that you'll need to complete the exercises. When you're ready, I'll see you there. 4. Tools + Materials: The tools and materials you need for this class are super-simple. You'll need a stack of paper. I recommend using loose sheets of really cheap paper. I use the paper that you'd use for printing or photocopying onto. Using loose sheets of paper that's really cheap is really helpful when we're trying to encourage confident drawing, because we just feel less precious about wasting it. For the same reason, I prefer working on loose sheets of paper rather than in a sketchbook for these drawing exercises, because there can sometimes be an invisible pressure with a sketchbook to make every page look nice, and that can impact on how we draw. Drawing on loose sheets of paper as well means that we can choose to keep or discard whatever you want later. You can always stick things into a sketch book if you want to. If you don't have any loose sheets of paper like this, you could try using a roll of paper, something like a plain wrapping paper. You could use bits of scrap paper, or even paper carry bags will work fine. You'll also need something to draw with that you can't erase. Any pen will be absolutely fine. It doesn't matter what the color is. It doesn't have to be black, it could be any color. Have a rummage of your stationary drawers and just grab out all of the pens that you have. When we do ball ups, we're going to try them out just to see which one's going to work best for you for these exercises. I know some of you will want to know what tools I'm drawing with in this class, and I do have a few favorite pens that I like to use for drawing. I'm going to list what they are in the class resource if you're interested to know more. But just remember you don't need anything special to do this class and these exercises, whatever you've already got at home movie will be just perfect. It's also helpful in this class to have some tape. Masking tape is really perfect for what we're going to be doing. But if you don't have masking tape some clear tape will be absolutely fine as well. You'll also want to have some scrap paper to put underneath your drawing paper when we're doing the exercises, because it's really likely that you're going to draw off the page, and you don't want to draw on your furniture. It's also going to be really helpful to have some kind of timer, because later in the class we're going to be timing some of our drawings. A kitchen timer is great if you have one or you've probably got something on your phone that can time for you. So this is it, this is all we need. We've got our tools and materials gathered, ready to start experimenting. In the next lesson, we're going to talk about subject matter and how to pick the best objects to draw, to encourage you to draw more confidently. So when you're ready, join me there. 5. Subject Matter: Your choice of what subject to draw is something that I thought deserves its own video in this class, rather than just telling you something to draw. Because there are some principles that you can apply to your choice of subject matter going forward, which will help you to make more confident drawings, whatever the theme you're working with. Always draw from real objects where that's possible. With a real object, you can change the position, the angle, the lighting to make for a much more interesting drawing. You can also get a much better sense of that object as a whole, its texture, imperfections, and other sensory information that's just really hard to get from a photograph. If you have no option to draw from reference images for your project, I really recommend try to get as many different photographs as you can of the same thing, to really improve your understanding of that object from all different angles. People who are less confident with their drawing will often choose really simple object with less detail on them, thinking that they're going to be easier to draw. This is a big mistake. Let's have a look at a couple of examples to see why. Natural objects are a great subject matter for drawing, Have a look at this collection of natural objects. If I asked you to pick one of them to draw, which one would you choose? We can divide them roughly into three categories; there are the really simple objects without very much structural change or detail or different types of textures on them, then there are those really complex objects with much more intricate detail, structural changes or textural variation, and then there's going to be those objects that fall somewhere in the middle of those two categories. Remember, when we're thinking about this we're thinking about line drawing, we're not thinking about introducing shading or color. Those objects that fall into the simple objects category should be avoided. Why? Because it's really difficult to make an interesting drawing out of a very simple object. Sometimes you'll end up just with an outline, like in the example of this stone or this smooth shell for example. If an object is got a simple shape and is the same texture all over, is going to be really hard to turn into an engaging, confident looking drawing. So that leaves us with the really complex objects and the medium complex objects. The choice heavily depends on your preferences and your desire for a challenge. But I'd encourage you to always pick something that feels a little bit more challenging than you would naturally want to pick. Let's break this down even further into one very specific type of object and have a look at some leaves. We might have a flattish green leaf that's got a fairly interesting shape, and then the other end of the spectrum, maybe there's a leaf that's dried out and curled up, maybe it's even got a bit of branch attached to it. Now, imagine I ask you to draw a leaf 20 times in different ways, which object is gonna give you more possibilities? The point here is don't let complex objects intimidate you. Actually, complex objects can give you far more possibilities, you also don't have to draw the entire object. You could just draw a section of it or a close-up, that can also really help to convey confidence in your drawing to show that you can represent the object without showing every single detail of it. Another thing to check when picking a subject matter is recognizability. What I mean by that is, is your object recognizable to other people? Pick something that most people could look out and immediately understand what that object is. Avoid objects like sculptures or novelty objects that don't necessarily convey what they are by their design. Let's have a look at another example of subject matter. Shoes. Shoes are great to draw. In actual fact, it's what I'm going to suggest we could use for our exercises today and is what I'm going to be drawing from. Why are shoes so good to draw? Well, pretty much everyone has shoes, so we can draw from real objects and they're recognizable. We also normally have a range of shoes styles to pick from, so we can make some appropriate decisions about complexity. Shoes also give us a pretty good range of views to explore, because they look different from each angle. From the available shoes that I have to work from today, I've decided to pick this trainer to work from. Because as is in common with lots of designs of trainer, it's got laces which are really nice to add a bit of complexity, and it's also got lots of different divided up areas of shape from different stitched areas and different panels on the side. This is going to be the object that I choose. You can, of course, choose a different subject matter if you prefer. Some other examples of great subject matter for these exercises would include portraits, so you could draw from someone else that you live with or you could draw from your own face, if you have a mirror available. Plants also make great subject matter, and so do animals. If you have a pet around, maybe they could be your subject. Have a look around and get your subject matter ready, grab your shoe or other objects, if you're going to be drawing something else. Join me in the next video, where we're going to be talking about other ways to prepare to get you in the best possible mindset to make really confident drawing. When you're ready, I'll see you there. 6. Confident Drawing Mindset: There are some things to consider beyond the materials that we're drawing with, the objects we're drawing from, and the drawing methods that we're going to use, which can really also impact how confidently we can draw. We need to also feel that we're in the right head space and mindset to draw confidently. Hopefully, some of these tips might help. You don't need to have your own studio space or even your own desk, but you just need to find somewhere that you can do some drawing where you feel comfortable and that you can be undisturbed. This is so important for you to feel that you can create. If you're on your on own, you know that you don't have to show your drawings to anyone unless you choose to. It's also important to feel comfortable where you drawing. If you're someone who gets stressed out by mess, don't choose to draw in a messy space. It can be nice to prepare a space for drawing before you begin that feels welcoming to you. It could be having a nice warm drink, or lighting a candle, having some inspiring objects around you, whatever makes it reflective of a welcoming, relaxing, and safe space for you. Try and prepare a space that's going to be great for you to create in. Being uninterrupted in your physical space is important, but so is ensuring that you won't be interrupted in any other way so leave your phone in another room, turn off your computer or TV if it's in the same room that you're drawing in. Some people can't draw without music on. I really like to have some music on when I'm drawing, but try to avoid any spoken word because that can really compete for your attention. Having some really nice relaxing background music or music that makes you feel good can really help to set a great tone and environment for your drawing. If you're drawing along with me, so you need to have the class running as we're going through, try turning off any notifications and closing any unnecessary tabs or programs, so that you minimize the chances of being interrupted. Alternatively, you could watch the demos through and then print out the class resource where I've listed what the drawing exercises are, if you know that you'll be distracted by drawing alongside a computer or mobile device. When drawing can feel intimidating to us, it's so easy to procrastinate. We are ready to start, but then maybe we just want to go and get that different pen from another room, or get some more paper from downstairs, and before you know it, you haven't even started yet and something else is already competing for your attention. It sounds simple, but just getting your tools and materials together in the space where you intend to draw, can really help to eliminate that procrastination barrier. This is particularly important if time is quite tight for you. If everything that you need to get started is right there in front of you, you're far more likely to be able to make the time to sit down and do it. You'll also find the experience far more enjoyable and less rushed, and that's going to have a knock-on effect to how confidently you can draw. Consider at what time of day you tend to feel most productive and creative and if it's possible, try to work with those timings. For me, I really like to draw in the morning. But I know some people really like to draw late at night when everyone else in the house is asleep. Also physically writing down that time that you designate to drawing in your calendar and setting a reminder can really help to safeguard it, and make sure that it actually happens. We thought about our materials, our subject matter, and any other ways that we can start to prepare to make more confident drawings. In the next video, we're going to start experimenting with the materials that you've gathered to see which ones are going to work best for you in completing the exercises. We're also going to complete a quick warm-up drawing. So, when you're ready, join me there. 7. Warm Up: Develop Your Line Language: Now you have your drawing tools, a stack of papers drawn, and you've got something to draw. It's time for us to start warming up. How long you spend doing this might just depend on how many different types of pen you have at home. Just start off by making some marks on paper. Just do some lines and squiggles. You just want to be checking that the pen's not going to run out on you and you just want to get a feel for it, does it glide ready fluidly across the paper? Or do you have to hold it in a very particular way to make it work? Because those pens want be be avoided. That one's running out a bit, so I'm not going to use that one. Just aiming to find the best pens for you to feel like they are really natural for you to draw with. Depending on what kind of paper you're using and the pens, some pens bleed more than others and you might like that or you might want to avoid that. If you have a big stack of pens like me that you're trying different versions and different types of pen, just start putting to one side those ones that you feel worked really well for you, they feel quite natural and fluid and you're not holding them in a very particular way to get them to work properly. Once you've settled on a pen that feels really natural to you, take a fresh sheet of paper and on that sheet of paper, task yourself with making as many different effects and miles with that one pen as you can. Think of it in a way as that pen line language. Try lines and squiggles, steeples, try holding the pen at different angles and in different ways to get different marks and variations just for making small changes with that one pen. There are two reasons why this is a really useful thing to do. Particularly if you're someone who often draws with those unconfident hairy lines, this is a great opportunity for you to train your hand in being more fluid and making more confident strokes without the pressure of it being a drawing and it having to look like something. It's also so common that we're really used to holding our drawing tool in a very particular way and we just stick with that. Exploring different ways that we can use our drawing tool, perhaps holding it in a way that seems strange to us, can just open up some different possibilities of creating different line qualities and it could end up being a drawing exercise in itself. If you have more than one pen available to you, try doing one of these sheets for each type of pen that you have narrowed down from your selection because it can help you to decide which one you want to use and it can also throw up some interesting results. I've tested out four different pens that I really like to use for drawing for different things. I've decided that the two pens I'm going to use for my exercises are the ones that gave me these warm-up sheets. I like these warm-up sheets because I think they've given me a nice range of different line qualities. I've managed to get some thick lines and some thin lines and I think they'll give me the best potential to make more confident looking drawings, that's why I've chosen those two. This one is a great pen for doing some really large-scale drawing, but you do have to pump the ink out, which is not going to be as helpful for doing some drawing exercises today. This pen is quite nice and gives me a nice fluid line, but it's just a bit finer. So I might keep this pen in reserve, but I prefer the other two that are slightly wider. Next, I want you to take a fresh sheet of paper and then position your shoe or other object if you're working from something else in front of you in a position which feels good for drawing, which you think it's going to make a nice view. Then we're going to do a quick warm-up drawing. Now before you begin, just have a quick check of your view of your object and think about the way that your paper is positioned. If your object is longer than it is high, make sure that your paper is positioned landscape, or if your object is taller than is wide, position your paper portrait. It sounds so obvious to say this, but it's so common that we don't consider that before we start to draw, and then we can end up bunching our drawing up in a way that isn't really natural and that can make our drawings look less confident. What you're going to do now is just do a quick warm-up drawing of this object in your normal way and in the normal style that you'd normally draw in. I don't want you to worry about this drawing. It's just something that's for you. You don't have to share it if you don't want to and it's really just to help you to understand how your drawings might change as we apply some of these drawing methods to them over the course of the class. If you do feel that you would normally draw with a pencil and eraser and that's how you feel most comfortable then please feel free to do that for this particular drawing. I want this to be reflective of how you would normally draw so that you've got something to compare the other types of exercises to. I'm going to use this finer pen because I actually often use this kind of pen to draw and we'll see how it compares when I start using the thicker pens later. So don't overthink it, don't worry about it, and don't spend a long time on it. Remember you don't have to show anyone anything that you're not comfortable sharing and it's just for you. I can already feel that this drawing is not going super well, but I'm just going to keep going. Remember this is just a warm-up drawing, it's not important, it's just something to help us to compare some of the other results against. You can already see that I've not left enough space for the end. It is great also to do a warm-up drawing because it's just a good opportunity to get to know our object before we start drawing it in different and more challenging and unusual ways maybe. It's not great, but it's not really meant to be, it's a warm-up. Here's my warm-up drawing. I'll be including all my drawings that I'll be doing in the class project example. So if you want to have a closer look, have a look there. I'm just going to label it warm up drawing because we'll be completing a lot of drawings over the course of this class. It's quite helpful to be able to remember which one is which. There's no pressure. But if you do feel comfy sharing this drawing and your line language sheets too, this is a great time to begin your class project. You can photograph or scan in your drawings and then upload them into your class project in the Project and Resources tab, it's great to see where you start from because as we go through the exercises, you will see the changes that will start happening to your drawing. Once you've done that, grab a fresh sheet of paper and join me in the next video where we're going to begin our first drawing exercise, which will be blind drawing. I'll see you there. 8. Exercise 1: Blind Drawing: Our first exercise is my personal favorite, which is blind drawing. This is an amazing exercise for developing confidence in your line drawing because you can't see your drawing until it's done. This sounds really counterintuitive if we're making something visual, but the thing with drawing in a normal way is that we get immediate feedback. As soon as we see marks starting to happen on the paper, we start to judge whether those marks are good or bad, and right or wrong. Then those feelings affect how we continue to draw, if we don't like what's happening, then those hairy lines can start happening and the multiple outlines, and we get into that vicious cycle of self-doubt again. This is also a great exercise because it helps us to train our observation muscles. Often in drawing, we draw an object how we think it looks rather than how it actually is. Having to really look intently and study this object is really helpful for starting to break out of that. These drawings are probably not going to look like your objects, but that's not important. We're not trying to create a realistic portrayal of a shoe. What we are concerned with is making different, more confident marks on the paper, and with practice, you'll find that you can replicate those confident marks when you're doing your regular drawing practice. There are two ways that you can go about this exercise. I'm going to show you both ways and you could pick one or you can try both methods. You'll definitely want to have your scrap paper under your drawing paper for this exercise, because it's quite likely that you're going to go off the edge of your paper. It's also really handy if you take down the coordinates of your paper so it doesn't move. I'm going to keep my object in the same position that it was for the last drawing. I'm going keep my paper landscape. If you're moving your objects, just check that your paper orientation is in the right position. I'm going to use one of the pens that I decided were the two most successful for making those confident marks from the warm up. I'm going to start with a marker. In the first method, you're going to draw the object in front of you without looking at your drawing. You need to be quite disciplined to do this and not cheat. If you think you might cheat, you could try positioning something like a spare piece paper between you and your drawing to block your view of it. Just make sure if you're doing something like that, that it's not stopping you from being able to move your hand freely. Another way you can get around it, if you think you might cheat is to raise the level of your objects up to eye level, so that you can't actually physically look at your objects and your drawing at the same time. If you have a clipboard or book to rest your paper on, another way to do it is to put your drawing paper behind you and actually draw over here. When you're doing this, I recommend that you draw with one continuous line without picking your pen up of the paper. This really helps for you to understand where the different parts of the drawing are in relation to each other, so it can really help with spatial awareness. It doesn't matter where you start with your objects. You might find it helpful to look at your paper to start with. Decide which bit you're going to start with, and then decide that you're not going to look at your paper any longer so that at least you know, you're starting in the right place. I'm looking really intently at my object and I'm trying to trace exactly what I'm seeing through my pen and onto the paper. I know that this is not going to look much like the shoe, but it's a really interesting exercise. See how you find it? I think I've gone off the paper, but just carry on. You can go as fast or slowly as you'd like for this exercise, but somehow I feel like going too slowly makes it harder. Because you can't really, remember where you've been. I think I've only got about the bottom part of the shoe left to do. I think I've covered everything. I'm not entirely sure, but I'm going to say that's done. Wow, interesting. I'm going to show you the second method straightaway and then we'll come back to have a look at our drawings at the end. For the second method of blind drawing, you're going spend a nominated amount of time. I suggest just one minute, just intently studying your object. Use your eyes to almost trace around the outside, look at all the details. It could be helpful for you to think about how many laces there are, or how many islands there are for example, so that you can remember that information. Then after that one minutes or however long you decide you're going to close your eyes and draw your object with your eyes closed. If you think you might cheat, you can use a blindfold. I'm going to use a blindfold because I'm quite bad at cheating a blind drawings. When you have your eyes closed or you're blindfolded, you can still feel some information. You can feel the edges of the paper. For a start. If you want to, you can't even touch your object and feel it and translate some of that information through drawing. I recommend that you keep using continuous line for this method as well, because it can really help you to understand where the parts of your drawing are. Something else that I really recommend as a tip is to use one finger on your drawing as an anchor point. I'm going to show you these drawings by Claude Heath, who is an amazing artist who's done lots of blindfolded drawings, and in them you might notice that there's a little blank spot and that's where he places one finger on the paper as an anchor point. That helps him to remember where on the page he started from. I'm going to start in the same place for me, the area at the top of the laces and is a good place to start because I know that it's not one and, but there's a little bit of shoe behind it as well, and I'm placing my finger there. I can feel, that's quite a long way from the top of the paper. So I'm going to move it up a little bit. Then just use a continuous line in the same way that you did before. Try to picture in your mind that image of the object and imagine that you're just tracing it. You noticed that I'm using my finger to feel where the edge of the paper is. It doesn't matter if you go off the paper at all. But it's handy, you can use other senses when you're drawing blinds, because you're drawing with a continuous line, you will be having to go over the same areas more than once, and remember, we're not trying to make it look like the objects that you're drawing. It's based on the objects. But what we're trying to think about is other ways of drawing that are going to give you some more confident marks and ways that you can think of just to mix up the way that you draw a little bit. I can't actually remember if I've done all the bits on the side, and it really doesn't matter. Remember these drawings are not going to look like your objects, but I'm going to say that I've done, let's have a look, interesting. Here are my blind drawings. This is method 1 and method 2. They still have quite a similarity of line quality to them even though they were done with the different methods, it's useful to just label your drawings, so that you can remember what the exercises are that you've done. I'm going to call this one blind drawing method 2. So now it's your turn. You can do either method of blind drawing or you could try both methods if you like. Remember, you can do these exercises as many times if you want to. You could try it in different materials to see if one suits you better. For this exercise, just make sure that you're using that material that you can't erase, and also don't forget to orientate your paper that suits the view of the object that you're thinking of and remembering. In terms of time. We're not timing these drawings but, take as long as you like. You'll probably find that you don't want to take too long, otherwise you can forget where you started. Most importantly, try not to look until you're done. It's really hard to do that. But I promise you get more out of it if you don't cheat, and remember, you can always use a blindfold or those other methods to prevent you from doing that. Now let's have a look at your blind drawing. What qualities does it have that maybe aren't there in your warm-up drawing? What's the line quality like? Does it seem more bold or forceful, or fluid or delicate? Try and find at least one positive word to describe your drawing. I remember there's some help words on the class resource if you need some help. Thinking about comparing my warm up drawing with my blind drawings, I would say they both feel energetic, they both feel quite expressive and fluid. You can get the sense that they were done quite quickly and that makes them feel more fun. You can tell what the object is from my warm-up drawing, but I actually think that drawing is quite boring. Whereas these blind drawings feel a lot more engaging to me. They make me want to know more about the drawing and what was behind it. I hope you enjoyed our first exercise in blind drawing. We'll be moving on to our second drawing exercise to develop confidence in the next video. So graphs some fresh few sheets of paper, and I will see you there. 9. Exercise 2: Non Dominant Hand: For this exercise, I'd like you to draw with the hand that you don't normally draw with. This exercise can be so helpful for developing more confident line-drawing because for most of us, drawing with our non-dominant hand takes away some control that we have over the outcome. Having less control means that we're less personally attached to what's coming from our pen. You won't necessarily expect a really accurate drawing, so you won't try so hard to control your lines. This means that it allows our line quality to become more confident. Also, when you have less control is really hard to enter in to those unconfident drawing cycles like the heavy lines or the multiple outlines, because you just can't control the pen well enough. Removing some aspect of control is a common theme amongst all these drawing exercises. It's something I bring in my own practice if I feel like my drawing is getting a little bit tight and needs loosening up. Often I'll try drawing with scissors and cutting out paper shapes in place of drawing their shapes because it can just help me to let go of what I think the shape should look like. If you're one of those really lucky people who can draw just as well with either hand, I'd encourage you to try and invent another way that you can take some control away from how you draw. Try gripping your pen in your fist, for example, and drawing with it like this, or threading it through your fingers and drawing like this, or you could even try holding it in your teeth or between your toes. There's going to be a bit more on this in the next video. For this exercise, you can look at your object and your paper as much as you'd like. But I'd always encourage you to spend a much higher proportion of your time looking at the object rather than looking at your drawing. You may want to reposition your object or you can leave it as is, it's entirely up to you. Next, take a fresh sheet of paper and make sure that the orientation suits your view of the object as you're looking at it. When you're drawing with your non-dominant hand, it's easiest to continue to draw in a continuous line as we did before. But if you want to, you can take your pen off the paper when you get to the end of this section, is entirely up to you. How long you take for this drawing doesn't really matter. We're not timing it, but take as long or as short as you'd like to. Very wobbly. As I'm drawing with my non-dominant hand, I'm actually just finding it really difficult to keep the lines fluid. They are very naturally wobbly. Might just be the way that I use my non-dominant hand. But it's interesting to see how your non-dominant hand might come out. I also have switched pens for this exercise. I'm using the pen that has a more brush on the tip, and that's giving me a little bit more variation in my line thickness, which I quite like, but I can't control it. I'm not sure if it's better or not really. It's nice to try out different things each time. Now it's your turn. Have a go with this exercise and see how you get on. You can draw in just one continuous line or you can take the pen off if you want to. Just see what feels the most natural. Most important thing is that you have less control because you're using that non-dominant hand. Again, there's no time limit for this drawing, but you don't really need to spend a long time on any of these drawings. Try to keep them all within five minutes maximum if you can. Remember, you can repeat the exercise as many times as you like. Again, remember to jot down on your drawing when it's non-dominant hand so that we can remember what they were when we're reflecting on them all. Let's have a look at the results. Are there any elements about the drawing that you can say show more confidence? Does it seem more energetic or perhaps more fluid? Try and find at least one positive word to describe your drawing. Something that I noticed about my non-dominant hand drawing is the line quality is quite different to the blind drawings. It feels a bit more wobbly in places, and you can even see in some places the lines have become a bit broken where the pens obviously lost contact with the paper. I obviously find it more difficult to keep a constant pressure with my non-dominant hand. What's interesting about this drawing as well is that I can now tell what it is. I can tell that this is a drawing of a trainer, but it does look really different to my warm up drawing. If you look at these two drawings side-by-side, I actually prefer my non-dominant hand drawing to the warm up drawing. I would say that it does have more elements of confidence about the drawing. The line quality just has more freedom and expressive qualities to it I think, that make it much more appealing. It's a drawing that I think is just much more lively and energetic than my warm up drawing. Fantastic. Don't forget to include a photo or scan of your drawing in your class project if you feel comfortable sharing it. Join me in the next video where we're going to be starting our third drawing exercise. Grab some more paper and join me there 10. Exercise 3: Hand, Body, Paper + Pen Position: We often tend to draw in the same way. We sit in the same position, hold our pen in the same way with our paper in front of us in the same way. But what happens when we change one or all of these things? Allowing a bit more physical freedom into your body as you draw can encourage you to translate that freedom into more fluid and confident drawing. For this exercise, I'd like us to play with our drawing set up a little bit by playing around with the position of our hand, paper, body, and pen positioning. I'm going to run through a few different ideas for you to try to mix things up a little bit. Feel free to try just one, or a few, or a combination of different things in one drawing, just see what appeals to you. First, as we mentioned in the last video, what about the way that we hold our drawing tool in our hand? Rather than holding your pen as you usually would, try holding it in your fist and drawing with it. Alternatively, you could try holding the very end of it or the very tip. You could try drawing with it threaded through your fingers. Why not take this a step further? What about switching your hand for something else? You could hold your pen in your teeth or between your toes. You could use some tape and perhaps tape it to a finger or your hand or your elbow. Be inventive and have some fun with this. It can be great fun trying to create drawings with other parts of your body. Do you always draw sitting down at a table? This makes complete sense because we have all our materials to hand and it's easy. But what happens if we just stand up or what about if we sit or lay on the floor and draw? Notice how you feel as you're drawing. You may find that you feel a bit more connected to the physical act of drawing itself. Is something interesting to try. Try introducing some movement into your body as you draw, this could be as simple as just standing back and stepping from side to side now and then, or you might want to have a bit of a dance around. This can be a lot of fun and a great way to incorporate that music and atmosphere that you've created for yourself in your drawing space. The movement and energy that you'll be guessing into your body can then be translated through the marks you make on the paper. It can really make for some really fun, expressive, and confident drawings. Let's have a think about your paper. So far we've been working with our paper positioned on a table in front of us, but what happens if we just lift that paper up and maybe stick it to a wall, so that we can sit or stand with it parallel to us? Don't forget though to put some scrap paper behind your drawing paper because you don't want to be drawing on your walls. If you have a clipboard, this is a great way of just getting your paper into a different position. It's quite easy then to lift it up and angle it. You could put it against some books. If you don't have a clipboard, just a piece of card or even a book would do just as well. Clipboard actually gives you lows of flexibility to try different things with your drawing. What about taking this a step further? You could try drawing with the paper facing away from you or perhaps you could draw with it behind your back, or you could stick it to the underside of a chair or table so that you're drawing with the paper above your head. Have fun thinking up new and inventive ways that you can just get your paper off that table into a position which is completely new for you. Let me know what you tried in your class project? Whether or not you can change the position of your drawing tool, will depend on what you've chosen to draw with. Some types of pen would just only work if they're held in a certain way. But some others, you may be able to just change the angle of it to the paper. If I use this brush-tipped pen, for example, I'll get a really different effect, if I hold it on its side and draw as opposed to drawing with the end of it. Thinking about changing up your pen a step further, what about exploring some other materials that you may have around at home? You've probably got some interesting things you could experiment with that you may not have thought of, and you don't necessarily need to have lows of expensive art supplies. Even just a piece of card or rolled-up paper dipped in some ink or paint can give you some great effects which you can apply to your drawings. If you don't have anything like paint or ink, you can improvise. The best place to look at home is probably in your kitchen cupboards. You could try drawing with melted chocolate or gravy, maybe some coffee or tea. The possibilities are endless, so just have fun. Now it's your turn. For each drawing, you can keep the view of your objects the same or change it, it's totally up to you. In this exercise, it will be really helpful if you keep labeling those drawings as you go through because you might end up making a lot of drawings in this exercise, and it's very easy to quickly lose track of how you created them. In this exercise, it can also be really nice to just jot down a word on each drawing about how you felt when you were drawing it because changing some of these things can really change how we feel. We're introducing movement or we're in a weird position, it's going to feel a little bit different to how we usually draw. It's interesting to reflect on the feelings that come up as you're drawing. Let's reflect on what we've done. We're going to have completely different results for this exercise, because there are so many different possibilities. But I'll just pick up on one or two things that I've noticed through the examples that I've created in demonstrating the exercise. Something that I thought was really interesting was the drawing I created whilst dancing around. This drawing has got a completely different line quality to my other drawings. It fills very rhythmical and you can almost feel that there was movement happening whilst I was doing this drawing. Something else that surprised me when I was doing these exercise is this drawing I created with the pen taped to my elbow. I'm actually surprised at how much control I had over drawing with my elbow. I thought I'd just end up with a heap of scribble on the page, but actually, you can tell what the drawing is and the line quality is actually really nice and confident and fluid. I quite enjoy drawing with a piece of card dipped into ink. Just because it makes you draw in a really different way. It gives you a huge range of line thicknesses in the drawing as well. That's something that I quite like to play with. I think when I've been able to use the full thickness of the cardboard and achieve that really thick line, that gives this drawing quite a feeling of confidence. I hope you've had fun with this exercise. I've certainly really enjoyed changing up all these different ways that I normally draw. If you feel comfy sharing it, please upload some of your drawings to your class projects and let me know how you create them. I would love to see them. In the next video, we're going to be exploring how drawing at different sizes can have an impact on how confident your drawing looks. When you're ready, grab some fresh sheets of paper and join me there. 11. Exercise 4: Playing With Scale: In this exercise, we're going to explore drawing your objects at three different sizes. We often tend to draw at a similar scale and sometimes the scales that we draw at won't be the best scale for us to draw with confidence. Often we choose that scale as a result of the materials that we're working with. We might draw the size to suit our paper, for example. Let's see if changing the size of our drawing can have an impact on how confident it looks. If you have a range of drawing tools to choose from, I recommend in this exercise you might want to experiment with going for a slightly thinner pen for your smallest drawings, and sizing up to a slightly thicker pen for your largest drawing. This is because a fine pen will just naturally look less confident if it's for a really large drawing. For this exercise, I recommend that you draw your object from the same view for all three drawings. That way it's much easier for us to compare across them directly to see which scale has more confidence for you. We're going to draw your object mini, medium, and massive. I'm going to give you some suggested sizes, but make sure to adapt those to suit you. You might be someone who often draws large, for example. Think about what sizes would be appropriate to take you just a little bit outside your comfort zone. For my mini size, I'm going to draw my object at around about five centimeters. Again, change that if it suits you. If you always draw small, you might want to go smaller, but if you're used to drawing really huge, you might find that too much of a challenge. For my medium drawing, I'm going to draw my object around about A4 size because that is naturally the size that I would normally draw things. For my massive drawing, I'm going to join together four sheets of A4 paper, so that's going to be roughly A2 size. But again, adjust that according to your preferences. If you're someone who really struggles to draw much bigger than that five-centimeter size, maybe for you drawing A4 will seem massive. I'm going to start with my mini drawing. I'm going to draw my mini drawing and my medium drawing on the same piece of paper because they're both going to fit on this A4. I'm going to go back to one of the pens that I did try out in my warm-ups, but I decided not to use it for some of the exercises because I felt it was a bit too thin. I think it will work really well for a much smaller drawing. If you want to size down your pen, feel free to just do a few extra warm-ups on some scrap paper if you would like to, if you find that helpful. I guess the thing with drawing really small is if you get any angles not quite right, it makes much bigger impact on a smaller drawing. Any imperfections seem magnified to me. I'm finding it really hard to draw this small. Interestingly, I think this drawing is looking a bit more like my warm-up drawing. These line qualities look more similar to that, I think. There's my mini drawing, and I'm going to go straight into my medium drawing now, and I'm going to use the pen that I have been using already for some of my other exercises. I'm just going to draw the shoe on the same piece of paper. That's my medium drawing, not hugely happy with it, it feels like I naturally felt like I wanted to go bigger. It'll be interesting to see what happens when I go larger in scale. Here we go, mini and medium. For my massive drawing, I've taped for pieces of A4 together. I've actually got an A2 size here, but just adjust the size to suit you. Two sheets together, that would be A3, might feel like enough. You just really want to feel like this is larger than you'd normally draw, it's pushing you outside your comfort zone. I'm going to go back to one of the pens that I did try a little bit for my warm-ups, which is this really fat marker just because I think it would be interesting to see what happens when I'm scaling up my media as well as scaling up the drawing. Because I've been using these fairly fat markers already for the A4 size, so I'd like to just try something a bit thicker to see what happens. Interesting to draw with this as a material. Because of the thickness of it, you see how I'm ending up using that thickness to show the width of the laces, for example. It's funny how different drawing tools can really give you a really different drawing experience. It's quite interesting. I feel like I've run out of space a little bit, I'll show you. I feel like I needed the paper to the slightly longer. What I might actually do to finish my drawing is tape an extra bit of paper onto the end. This is another one of my tips. This happens so often in drawing, we start drawing on a bit of paper that's a particular size, and then we run out of space before we finish drawing the object. Often we'll end up bunching and squeezing our drawing into the remaining space just to finish the drawing, and it can actually distort your drawing and make it look less confident. If you just tape an extra piece of paper on and then finish the drawing, even if you take it off afterwards, if you need the drawing to be a particular size or shape, it just helps to keep your drawing more confident and keep those proportions looking a bit more natural. I've just taped an extra bit on the end. I'm going to finish the drawing now because I've left the end part a little bit, and hopefully it will look a bit less squashed. Now I've got more space to play with. There's my massive drawing. You can see the difference that it's made just having that extra piece of paper on the end. This is what it would look like if I took that away, it's just going to be cropping the very toe of the shoe, but that's okay as well. But I think I'll just leave it on there. Now it's your turn to try a mini, medium, and massive drawing. Remember, you can switch your pen thicknesses. Try a thinner pen for your mini drawing and a thicker one for your massive drawing. Remember, draw the same view of your object for all three of them so that it's a bit easier for us to make some direct comparisons at the end. Try to keep up the pace with these drawings. Even though you're increasing the scale, try to keep up that energy and pace. Try not to take too long with your larger drawings if you can. Does one of your three sizes of drawing feel more confident than the others, and can you identify why that might be? Now, if I reflect on my own mini, medium, and massive drawings, for me, I feel that the massive drawing actually shows the most confident lines. You can see that the pen thickness of my massive drawing has forced me to draw in a way that I think looks more confident. You can see that these strokes are much more simple, and in that way they have this feeling of more confidence about them, they feel more energetic, and they feel like they're drawn with a bit more conviction and confidence. That being said, I think if I did a drawing at this scale in my medium thickness pen, I don't think it would work so well. I think your medium will have something to do with the scale being appropriate. The medium drawing, I think is okay, but it doesn't feel as confident as the massive one. The mini one I think is actually quite bad. For me, that scale is just too small. Even though I reduced the size of my pen, it feels unconfident and muddle drawing. These results quite surprise me because I never draw this large, I always draw A4 or sometimes A3, but I don't tend to go much bigger than that. This is something that maybe I'm going to try incorporating into my own work. If you feel comfy sharing the results, I'd love to see what you've created in your class project. Don't forget to photograph or scan your drawings and add them to your project. Also, let me know in your project, did you notice that working at a particular size seem to work better for you? In the next video, we're going to be doing our last drawing exercise together, which is speed drawing. Grab a few more sheets of paper and something to use as a timer and join me there. 12. Exercise 5: Speed Drawing: So far, I've given you some suggested but quite loose ideas around how long to spend on your drawings. But for this exercise, we're going to draw against the clock. Giving yourself a time limit for a drawing is a great way to encourage confidence and a spirit of just letting go and going for it. If you only have 60 seconds to draw an object, there just isn't the time to enter into some of those low confidence habits like the hairy lines or the repeated outlines. Drawing quickly also forces us to make some decisions about the object, which parts to include, and which can be left out. The act of doing this can convey a feeling of confidence in your drawing in itself. It's that knowledge that you can communicate what the object is without having to include all of the details. I know that the idea of drawing really quickly can be quite daunting. Have confidence in the fact that you know your object really well now, because you've been drawing it quite a few times. Before we begin, just have a look at your object and consider what's the most important part of it, because that's what we're going to start with in these speed drawings. If you're drawing a shoe like me, your shoe might have laces. In my case, I think the laces probably are the most important part of this shoe, but it could be another distinguishing feature. Starting with the most important part makes sure that you can communicate what the object is even if you can't finish the drawing. We're going to start with a one minute drawing, and this is going to be our longest drawing. For your selection of speed drawings, I recommend keeping your object in the same position so that you have the same view of it each time. This means that you can learn from each drawing and take some of the information from it into the second drawings, which will get quicker and quicker. Position your paper in position, make sure it's at the right orientation to suit the view of your object. Then, we're going to have 60 seconds for this and it's our longest drawing. Make sure that you've chosen a size to draw at and a tool to draw with it, it'll appropriate for you to be able to draw quite quickly. We're going to start in 3, 2, 1, go. We may be out time. That's my one minute drawing. We're going to go straight away into our 30 second drawing. It's worth just thinking about how that went, how was it drawing that quickly and thinking about what changes you might need to make to draw the same thing but in half the time. I actually found it quite hard to start with the laces, which is what I was trying to do. I think I'm naturally drawing things in a similar order when I draw this object. So I found that quite hard. I think I'm going to struggle to do enough detail in the laces in 30 seconds. What I might do is something that I picked up from my drawing with a thicker pen. I'll just use single strokes to show the laces rather than trying to draw the outline of it and see if that helps me to speed things up. Grab a fresh sheets of paper, get everything ready, and we're going to stop straightaway, 3, 2, 1, go. It's going pretty fast. That's all I managed to get. But you can tell what it is, which for 30 seconds is not too bad. I didn't expect that I'll get the whole thing drawn. Next we're going to try 15 seconds. Fifteen seconds feels very, very fast, so we've got to really think carefully about how to do this. I think I'm going to try the same approach with just using single line for the laces, but I do feel like trying to draw the whole shape of the thing is quite important as well. I'll just see what I can get done. Fifteen seconds starting in 3, 2, 1. Fifteen seconds, you can still tell what it is I think, or maybe it's captured something of the essence about it, but definitely less detailed, but that doesn't necessarily mean it's less confident. Now it's your turn, have a play with some speed drawings and see how you get on. If you're someone who draws really slowly and that can really encourage those feathery lines and multiple outlines, just setting yourself a timer and even just allowing yourself five minutes for a drawing can really help you to encourage your drawing to become more confident. Some people might also find 15 seconds completely manageable. You might want to really push this exercise and try drawing your object in five seconds. Try experimenting with different timings that might suit you. But remember, it's important that the timings are all pushing you outside your comfort zone. Don't set yourself a time of five minutes if you know that you can definitely complete the drawing in that time. Don't forget to record on your drawings how long you had for each, so that we can remember when we're comparing everything at the end, and so that we can see in your class project what will the exercises relate to. Let's take a look closer and consider how drawing quickly has really affected the style and the confidence that we can see in these drawings. Do you think they appear more or less confident when they're done quicker? In my drawings, I actually feel as though the quicker drawings of 15 seconds and 30 seconds are more effective than the one minute drawing. I think for me the way that I was drawing, I was drawing with a lot of pace, and I almost think that one minute was too much. I think I added too much detail in that time. I actually much prefer my 30 second and my 15 second drawings, which I think just have much more fluidity and movement, and energy to them. Now it's your turn. Have a play with some speed drawings and see how you get on. If you feel comfy sharing them, I would love to see the results in your class project. Please make sure to photograph or scan your drawings in and have them if you feel happy to do that. 13. What Next?: Well done. You've stuck with me as we've worked through some fun and occasionally quite challenging drawing exercises. How can these exercises help you with your drawing confidence tomorrow, next week, or five years from now when you're working on different drawing projects? There are a few things that you can do to keep up that great work that you've just done. Do more of what worked. Take a minute to lay out all the drawings that you've just done in the exercises and just really notice which drawings feel that they have more line drawing confidence. Hopefully, within some of these exercises, you may have found one or two things which have really clicked for you. Whichever technique has worked best for you, just try to do more of that in your regular drawing practice. Whether it's changing the size of your drawings or perhaps holding your pen differently, try to define at least one thing that has worked really well for you in making your drawings look more confident that you can bring into your regular drawing practice. Let me know what it is in your class project or in the discussion board. I use some of these techniques in my own regular drawing practice. As a slow drawer, I find that using a timer really works for me in keeping some spontaneity and energy in my drawings. I'd love to hear what works for you. Be positive. Think of every drawing you do as an experiment. Even if you don't like the end result, try to find at least one positive thing about that drawing that you can learn from and implement into your future drawings. It could be as simple as you enjoy the medium that you're working with or you like that subject matter. If you do this continually, you will begin to develop a really good instinct for what you enjoy and what works in your drawing. This will really feed into helping you to develop your own unique drawing style. Draw regularly. Regular practice will really help to train your hands in making those more confident marks in your drawings. It's a bit like exercise. The more you do it, the more natural it feels. Warm-up. Exactly as you would do for exercise. Warming up and exploring your drawing tools and developing your line language will really help you to develop more confidence in your drawing. The better you get to know your drawing tools and the different marks that they can make, the more confidently you'll be able to use them in your drawings. Sometimes those warm-ups and doodles can also lead to some really interesting things. They might be jumping-off points for different drawing exercises, or perhaps they'll become drawings in their own right. Get out of your comfort zone. Every now and then, it's helpful for you to do something in your drawing practice that takes you outside of your comfort zone. Think of it like a spring cleaning for your drawing skills. It's exactly what you've just done in going through these exercises. Try to build in occasional spring cleanings to your regular drawing practice. You could return to these exercises that we've just done or you could invent new ones. To invent your own exercises, just think of some new ways to invent some constraints to place on the way that you draw. For example, as I mentioned earlier, sometimes I like to draw with scissors and cut out paper shapes. If you develop some new exercises that work for you in the way that you draw, I'd love to hear what they are. So please feel free to share any new exercises or ideas for exercises in your class project or in the discussion board. Wherever you currently are in your drawing journey, you can absolutely apply what we've learned here today with these drawing exercises to your next steps in drawing. If you're someone who likes to draw for fun or for relaxation, you've now got a great foundation to build upon, to help you draw in a way that feels really fun, freeing, and you can make up some of your own exercises as we've discussed to keep you on that track of confidence drawing and having fun. You might be a seasoned artist, designer, or Illustrator. I hope these exercises are a really helpful addition to your drawing toolkit that you can return to again and again when you need to freshen things up. You may be a beginner who's now keen to learn some of the more technical sides of drawing, like learning proportion or perspective. The focus of skills here will be different. But you can still draw your subject with a confident line quality by using some of the skills that we've explored in these exercises. For example, I do a fair bit of fashion illustration. I'll often construct the figurative proportions with a quick pencil sketch first. But then I'll render my fashion illustration by using some of these techniques. For example, sometimes I'll use my non-dominant hand or draw with a continuous line. That way I can check my proportions and make sure that they're accurate. But the finished drawing will still have that kind of spontaneous, fun, and confident line quality that we've been exploring in these exercises. Also, we've just been drawing from one simple object in these drawing exercises. But these principles can be applied to any subject matter. It may be that you're really interested next in exploring abstracts, or figurative drawing, or landscapes, or still life portraits, really anything you can apply these principles to. If you take these exercises and then apply them to perhaps a more complex composition or a different kind of subject matter, I'd love to see what you do with them. Please feel free to add anything additional to your class projects. Because I love seeing how students take the skills that they learn in the class and then apply it in a new way. 14. Thank You!: Thank you so much for taking this class. I really hope that the exercises we've worked through and the discussions that we've had have opened up some new ideas for you to integrate into your drawing practice to help you develop more confident drawing. Developing confidence in your drawing is not easy, and it's not necessarily something that you can just do overnight. It takes practice, perseverance, and a bit more practice, just like any other drawing skill. If there's one thing you take away from this class, I hope that it's the fun that you can when you just allow yourself to just let go and try things that are just a little bit or even a lot outside your comfort zone. We've covered a lot from identifying what confident drawing might look like and how to encourage it, as well as those things to avoid, how to choose the best subject matter to encourage more confident drawing. The best ways to prepare for your drawing sessions to maximize your chances of success, the best materials to choose, and how to warm up. You've now got this toolkit of exercises that you can return to again and again whenever you feel that you want to mix things up in your drawing, I would absolutely love to see the results of your drawing exercises. If you feel comfy sharing, please do post a class project. Remember, please also leave some some comments on other student's projects. If you have any questions or run into any problems, do feel free to reach out in a discussion tab, and I'll do my very best to help you. If you've enjoyed this class, please do consider leaving me a review. I would so appreciate it. Don't forget to follow me here on Skillshare so that you get to hear about my class releases and all my competitions and giveaways. I have lots more classes currently in the planning, so if you have any requests or suggestions for class topics, please do let me know. You can reach out in the Discussion tab or you can also find me on Instagram. Speaking of Instagram, if you post any of the work that you created there from this course, please do tag me and use the hashtag #Melryskillshare so that I can see what you post because it always absolutely makes my day to see your work. Thank you so much again for taking this class. It really means a lot to have you stop by and spend time with me learning these skills. I hope that I'll see you in another one of my classes soon. Bye for now.