Unleash Your Creativity: Draw Without Fear in 5 Simple Exercises

1. Unleash Your Creativity & Draw Without Fear - Introduction : Hi, my name is Marie-Noelle Wurm and I'm an artist and illustrator. What I'd like to focus on in this class is to teach you techniques to draw without fear. Let's say you want to draw. You get all your tools together, you have your piece of paper in front of you, and then suddenly these little thoughts pop into your mind. "I don't know how to draw, I've got two left hands, I'm not talented. I'd like to draw but I have no idea what I'm going to draw." Those are some of the thoughts that can pop up. Let's say you get over that first hurdle and you've done something, you have your finished drawing in front of you, then some other thoughts might pop up, like, "I knew that I wasn't good at drawing or this drawing really sucks. Why don't I take this little piece of paper and put it in the trash can before anybody ever sees it because it's embarrassing how bad it is." I've definitely had these thoughts pop-up into my mind especially when I was starting out. All these thoughts though are rooted in fear. Through five simple exercises, I want us to work on overcoming these inner hurdles and reconnecting with the creativity that's inside you. Because it's there, you just need to find the right amount of sunlight and water to feed it like these guys. The reason that I find this super important is because these are hurdles that I've had to overcome. You see pictures and you're like, "Wow, I wish I could do that." Or you just want to be able to have fun, but then you have all these thoughts that come up that destroy the fun that's inherent in drawing. I really feel like this is something that we can work on. Think about it. When you learn how to read, what if you heard somebody be like, "Reading, I'm just not talented enough. I'm just, other people are way better at it than I am, so I'm just not going to do that." Won't that seem weird? That tells you how we perceive things in a different way and we see drawing as something that is connected to an innate ability whereas reading we see it as a skill. Well, drawing is also a skill. Even some other things that I want us to work on. I'm really looking forward to seeing all your projects and thank you for joining my class. 2. Key Concept for this class: Artistic experiments: The key concept that I'd like you to keep in mind for all of the exercises that we're going to be doing together, is that they are all artistic experiments. This is super important because it alleviates the pressure of creating a successful drawing. An experiment is always successful, even if it fails. Why? Because it gives you information, and that information is key to learning to deal with fear. The other reason why a failed experiment is a success, is because it's the mark of a successful attempt and if you're trying something, if you're working on it, then that's already a huge success, especially if you've had a lot of fear that has stopped you from being in the moment and actually doing the thing that you want to be doing. 3. Tools for the Class: Hey, I'm really glad to see you that you've joined the class and I can't wait to get started. The first thing that we need to talk about is tools, because if we're going to draw, we need some stuff to draw with. The first thing that I had ask you to try to find, if you have in your home a blank sketch book somewhere, just something that has pages that are tied together, and then I think that would be super fun, because we'll be able to look back on it once we've finished all the exercises. What I have here is a sketchbook. It's all blank. I just got it, so I'm really excited. I would say A4 size is super fun, but if that really terrifies you, then you can go for like an A5 size, so half of this, but I do like this size because you get a lot of room to play with. The most important thing is getting something that doesn't make you so terrified to use it, that you won't actually use it. The most important thing for me is that you find something that gives you space, and the freedom to create stuff. So whatever it is that you find, that will work. Also, in terms of tools, I have a bunch of tools, obviously because this is what I do on a daily basis, but you can use whatever it is that you have at your house. If you want to go buy stuff in addition to what you already have, that's fine as well. Here are some of the things I have. I have these pigment liner pens of different sizes, so from 0.8 to 0.05. So then I get a good range. I have some water color, and I also have a ton of pencils, different kinds of pens, but literally can also even be ballpoint pens. Whatever tickles your fancy, and can be a fun thing to work with. So yeah, in terms of pencils, I have a tendency to like the really dark ones like 4B, 5B, but I also often use some normal HB or some lighter ones. It also gives you a good range. I also have like nib, which is super fun. I don't know, I guess we used to call it quill, but there's no feather on it. This can be something super fun if you have ink lying around. I don't have any with me so I probably won't be using it in these videos, but basically anything goes. Charcoal is also super fun like chalk pencils, those are amazing. Well, I like them. For our first exercise, I'm going to ask you to take your sketchbook, or whatever book it is that you found, open it. I'd like you to leave the first two pages blank, because we're going to come back to that. Well, actually the first page, whatever, it's fine. I leave two you, but you can leave one, and then we're going to start this exercise on this page. Why don't I show you what we're going to do. 4. Experiment 1: Your Tools, Your Curiosity, an Abstract Drawing : For this first drawing, I'd like you to take the sketch book that you have, the different tools that you find, and I want us to experiment with all the different tools that you have at your disposal. Literally, I want you to explore what each tool has to offer. How is the texture of the pencil different from the texture of this pen, or different from the texture of that other pen that you have. What about these markers? How did the colors feel when I'm using those? How does it feel when I'm using colored pencils? There are probably some tools that you will find more fun to work with than others, that's interesting information. There's some tools that you won't like it all. Why is that? While you're exploring how these different tools react, how you react to the tools, I want us to create a drawing and it will be abstract which means that it doesn't have to look like anything. But I want you to use your curiosity and use that as the driver for this drawing. If the result in itself is not something that you find pleasing, that's okay. It's just an experiment that gives you information. Please feel free to share your experiment with the others in the class, because the more that we do this the more we create a space where everybody feels safe. 5. Demo — Experiment 1: Here I am with my sketchbook and all my tools and I'm going to do that first exercise that we talked about, where I'm going to be trying to explore all the different tools that I have at my disposal and just have fun with it. Let's start with some chalk pencils. I have a bunch of those. These are just a few. Here's some pigment liner pen. It shows the 0.5. See how those interact with each other. Very different field. This is my artistic experimentation for the day. Things that I really enjoyed today were the charcoal. All these sections are really liked how greedy was, but I also liked how it was interacting with the smoother ink, the black ink that I put on in the beginning. I also made a cool discovery today, which was that when I used a little bit of watercolor. I don't know if you saw in this section here, and then when I used that wet brush and the chalk pencil, it kind of turned into a paintbrush that had chalk on it. So I was able to make all these cool kind of textured lines here and I hope that you've had a lot of fun with your experimentation and that you made a lot of discoveries. Feel free if you want to write all these discoveries down on the left page and please share what you made in the project section. I can see it, so other people can see it and we can comment on it. We can give each other feedback and tell each other what textures we find cool or what colors we like. It'll be interesting to see what everybody made. 6. Experiment 2: Having Fun With Hand-Lettering: Hey. I hope that you had fun doing that first exercise and you learned some interesting information in terms of the textures that you appreciate or the colors that you like, or even the shapes that you made. What did you discover when you were working on this abstract drawing? Something I'd also suggest that you do for this exercise is you can write down these discoveries on the other side, on the other page where you did your drawing so that you can have a visual reference of the work that you've done and see where you are going. For this second exercise, we're going to be blending two different things, that is drawing and typography. Obviously topography is a whole subject in itself and we could do a whole class just on that. But I just want us to explore how that can be fun and also to solidify this key concepts that I talked about in the first exercise. I want you to take your sketchbook again and come back to that first page that you left blank. What we're going to do is to create a title page for our sketchbook. Just as a visual reminder of what it is and to help yourself gain that freedom whenever you open it. The title I thought up, was my little book of artistic experimentations. But if you have a different name that you'd like to give it, that's fine as well. I just hope that you will keep in the title that notion of freedom and of allowing failure and failure being already a success. Those are just the main ideas that I'd like you to have in your title page. When you're doing this, I want you to explore using the tools that you have, how you can make the letters fun to draw, so they can have weird textures, they can have weird patterns, they can keep tiny, they can be huge, play around with it. You can add color, you can stay in black and white, that's up to you. I'm going to show you my version of it, I look forward to seeing yours. Please feel free to share with everybody else in the class because I'm sure that there is going to be many cool possibilities that come from that. So that's our second exercise. 7. Demo - Experiment 2: Here I am doing the second exercise. I made a slight mistake in the explanation. You can use the title my little book of artistic experiments rather than experimentation just because it's shorter and they're less letters. I'm using mostly watercolor and then also some ink. I just want to show you some other options of letters that you can make. Just to pull things a little bit more, to make things a little bit more creative, a little bit more interesting. As you can see, most of my letters here. I mean, these were a little elongated. But in general they all have the same size. What I could have done or what I can do for next time is increase that variations. For example, I could start out with this super big B, but that would stay really thin. I realized you couldn't actually see the letters that I was making. So here are the long skinny ones and then here are the ones that are elongated in the other away kind of short, and then the tiny little ones, Here's the S, the snake version of it. Like I said, there are so many options you can do so many things with these letters. Transform them, try things out and show us your version of your title page. You can also add drawings and please share with everybody so we can see how many creative possibilities everybody has come up with, because it would be super fun. 8. Experiment 3: Creative Self-Portraits + Drawing to Music: For this third exercise, it's actually several exercises because the first two are shorter, and so I wanted to give you a few more options so that you can have more fun at them. We're going to to be working on a subject that usually inspires a lot of fear in people, but we're going to try to break it down. The subject is the self portrait. This seems like a daunting task. Why does that often seem like a daunting task? Because we're immediately thinking of "all, needs to look like me", and I don't know how to draw anything resemblance, so how's that ever going to work? Well, there are a few different ways that it can work. The first exercise is going to draw a self portrait with your eyes close. This breaks the idea of the self portrait needing to look like us. But try to keep in mind maybe a characteristic of yourself. For example, I know I often wear glasses, so in myself portrait I'm going to be drawing glasses. What's interesting about keeping your eyes closed, is you'll get to see how deformed your self portrait might become, and it's something that you can explore in other drawings. You could decide, I'm going to draw a cat with my eyes closed, and then you can laugh about how silly looks. The funny thing is, sometimes it will bring you into a different space and make you create something that's more creative than you might have thought if you had your eyes open, so go with it. The second miniature exercise we're going to do is another self portrait, except this time using your non-dominant hand. I'm right handed, so my non-dominant hand is my left hand, so I'm going to be making a self-portrait this time with my eyes open using my left hand. Why is this important? Because the left hand is actually super important tool to overcoming fear. Because we control it less, and since we control it less, it also alleviates some of the pressure we might have over performance and getting the line right. Try to explore that, see how it feels, you could do one, you can do many of them, whatever you feel comfortable with. For this third part of the exercise, I'd like you to choose a specific piece of music that you especially love, and I want you to draw something with the music being the main driver behind your dry. What does that mean? It means that you can be listening to the music and perhaps the tempo speeds up, and that will influence how you draw your line, your line will get quicker, or there might be some beads here and that might give you a certain texture over there. Use the music to creatively explore the lines, the shapes, the colors on your piece of paper, and if you want to include something figurative in there, that's fine too, that can be super fun. I hope you enjoy these little exercises, and I look forward to see what you make with them. 9. Demo - Experiment 3: Here I am at the end of the first part of the third exercise with my two self-portraits, blind and left-handed. They were super fun. I really liked how this one came out. This one in the beginning, I wasn't totally happy with it. But then as I kept doing it, I think there's an interesting energy that's coming out there. If I wanted to, I could also just keep making more of these. That would be fun. I like how I placed them opposite each other. It wasn't really done on purpose, but it's fun to see that. I hope you enjoyed that and that you had a laugh also with the blind one and the left-handed one. These are tools that you will keep on using in the further exercises. Here I am getting ready to do that second part of the third exercise with the music. I've chosen my music and why don't we get started? This is my artistic experiment for the day. What I discovered as I was doing it was that when I was putting pencil and wet watercolor, I made these cool lines that you see here. I wrote that down on the left-hand side as a reminder for next time. Something else that was fun while I was doing this exercise is, as you can tell from the music, it's like a flowy atmospheric song. So I had a lot of fun making all these lines down here and then up here. It really inspired me to use the watercolor over here. Something else also that you should know is that if your song isn't long enough to finish your drawing, you can go ahead and put it on repeat. That's what I did with mine. I hope that you had a lot of fun doing this exercise and I can't wait to see what you made. 10. Exercise 4: Create a Chaotic Sketchbook Page: I hope you've enjoyed those previous exercises. Today we're going to be doing something slightly different. What I'd like us to do, is to choose an object or a thing that you find inspiring, so an inspiring image of something. I love jellyfish so may be my image could be a photo of a jellyfish. I'm going to take that image that I find on Pinterest or in books wherever it is, and I'm going to try to practice drawing it realistically. What I mean by that is simply that, try to draw it as is, it doesn't need to be super perfect, we don't need it to be ultra realistic. Actually, I would recommend that you don't because there could be copyright issues with the person who made the photograph. It's more like a reference image; you use it to understand, this is the shape of it, this is how it works, and I'm going to try to put that on paper. Once you've done that, then I want you to explore how you can take that basic form and pushing it into different ways; so maybe abstracting it, maybe taking outlines, maybe adding some. I want you to really take that reference image and then start transforming it using your own creativity, using the different things that you might have learned in the previous exercises. I really want us to see a bunch of these different images just so you see what you can do with different things. If you can share that process with us, that would be awesome because this is the fun part, sharing all the different possibilities. You can tell us which one do you like best, which one don't you like, what is the information that you've found while doing this. I hope you like this exercise and I look forward to seeing you in the next video for the last one. 11. Demo - Experiment 4: Here I am ready for the fourth exercise. I found my reference photo, the jellyfish. I like over little interesting shapes here, I'm going to try to have fun with that. Here's my first little drawing where I was trying to be a little bit more faithful to the shape of the jellyfish in the picture. I didn't modify a few little things and I didn't make it the same position so as not to cause any issues. Now, I'm going to try different tools, different textures, different sizes and shapes. This is the end of my exercise. For this one, I tried to switch the jellyfish upside down, it's just a circle with all these lines coming out. In here, I just had fun using all kinds of pastel and markers. Here, I was trying something a little bit more geometrical, which is okay, not my favorite. This I thought was also interesting is just using the pastel and then using the eraser to actually make the shape. That makes an interesting texture that I think I could use in the future for something else. In terms of the shape and how I was trying to experiment with different things, I would say my favorites are these two. They're my most abstract versions of the jellyfish, and as you can tell, they're much more 2D, they're much more, I guess, graphic. The things that I liked more specifically about these two is, this one almost doesn't even look like a jellyfish anymore, it almost looks like a flame or a leaf inside a bubble that has some roots coming out, at least that is what I see. Then in this one, I used some of the structures that were in the picture. You see these little tubes that were hanging off, that it started making. Well, instead of putting them hanging off the jellyfish in a 3D way, I just stuck them on top, like a Mohawk. I just think it's a fun shape. Those are things that I could use in the future. I'm just going to put a little star here. I know that those two are my favorite. All these obviously, I put them together in a haphazard fashion because it's sketchbook. But if you want to have a more finalized drawing, you can always just take your favorite experiments and then redo them on the left side or on a different page. I hope that you made a ton of fun discoveries as well. Please feel free to share with everybody in the project section, and let us know which ones you like, which ones you don't like, what you had fun with today. 12. Experiment 5: Make a Mistake on Purpose & Have Fun With It: For this final fifth exercise, I would like you to choose something. It could be an object, it could be an animal, it could be a person, it could be a thing and make a small drawing of it, please don't take the whole page because well, it'll become clear in a second. Choose a little section of your page where you're going to draw this thing or this animal or this plant and put a lot of care into this drawing using, of course, all the tools that we've talked about. If you want to use your left hand to alleviate the pressure, you can do that. Make something a little bit more abstract. That's fine. The thing that's important is I want you to really spend some time and effort into this small drawing. Once you're pretty satisfied with it, I'd like you to take one of your tools and close your eyes and use that tool to make a mark somewhere on the page. What I basically want you to do with this is to create a mistake. Now why do I want us to do this? Is because when you're drawing mistakes often happen. I can be working on a certain drying and my ink will spill and there will be a big splotch of ink right on my drawing where I was "Oh, I was almost finished with it. I was so happy with it." Most of the time when this happens, there are all these thoughts and fears and anger also that comes up. Frustration, "I just finished it. This was good. I was happy with it now it's all ruined." But it can also be re-framed. This thing that happened, is literally just that, a thing that happened. A mistake is not necessarily failure. When it is a transformation, it's something unexpected. You expect it to be done, you expect it to have the drawing that you worked on in front of you and then it's suddenly something completely different. Now what are you going to do with that? I want us to artificially create a mistake onto this drawing and then I want you to spend time looking at it, seeing what it brings up, the frustration, the anger of the sadness, "I don't even like this drawing anymore I'm just going to put it away." I want you to push past that by taking whatever tool it is that you want and transforming the drawing to integrate that mistake into a new drawing. I find this very interesting because it means that it's pushing you into a new space, into the unknown and the unknown is something that we often find scary, right? Sometimes we are, but I don't know what I'm going to do with this thing. It's just a thing. It's like a big splurge and doesn't match what I made so I just don't get it and that's okay. But try anyway. You'll see that little by little. If you keep this idea of transforming, of creating a new image, then that will start to shift at some point that if you're still unhappy with it, keep transforming it. Usually in my own practice, when I feel like a drawing isn't finished, it just means I haven't transformed it enough. Keep transforming it until you have the feeling that, "I think I'm getting into something interesting here. Wait, this shape can actually turn into this animal or this creature or this abstract form that can fit in with the little drawing that I made in the beginning." There are a lot of different ways that this exercise can go. I'm really excited to see how you guys explore it and I really hope that you find some interesting information also in it. As with all the other exercise, please don't hesitate to write on the side, "This is what I figured out through this exercise." That would be great. I'll see you soon. 13. Demo - Experiment 5: I'm ready for the fifth final exercise. I'm going to start drawing my little thing somewhere on this page. I think I might draw a house. Now that I have my little house made, I'm going to close my eyes and I'm going to make my mistake. That's going to be fun. I'll see you in a bit. I'll show you what I end up doing with this. Hey, so I just realized that my video screwed up and I didn't make my time-lapse, so I'm sorry, you didn't get to see this as I was building it. I'm going to initiate the time-lapse now again. You can see how I've transformed these yellow lines into plants that are way bigger than this house, and so I just use those shapes as just a starting point, and these little [inaudible] , they made me think of like cat tails. This look more like a flower and something a little chaotic about it that I liked. I just tried to push it in that direction. I think I'm done with this one. I added a few more of these grasses, I guess, at the bottom. I stayed pretty figurative in a sense that evoked plants and stuff like that. I wanted to show you what it would be like to then just randomly add something abstract to it. This is what I started doing with this shape here. Obviously, abstract things can evoke images. For example, this reminds me of fabric or threads or a spiderweb, but the important thing is simply that you're adding these abstract elements in order to create something a little new, something that you wouldn't necessarily expect with the rest of your drawing and that can be super fun. Some of the discoveries that I made today is that I really like this golden yellow with darkish pink. Yellow like this as a color that I don't often use and I'm realizing that I actually like it with the black. I'm going to keep that in mind. I'm just going to make like a little mental note and I might write something down here. I look forward to seeing your versions of this exercise. I hope that you had fun with it and that even if at some point you were slightly terrified, for example, after creating your mistake, you had no idea where you're going with it. I hope that even if you had that, you push through it and try to see where it would bring you. If you're happy with the results, then that's awesome. If you're not happy with the result, it doesn't matter, re-frame it. Think of, what is it that I've learned in this drawing? What are the things that I can take with me for the next drawings that I do? I'll see you soon. 14. Thoughts For Your Future Creative Endeavors (updated): This is the last video of our class and I first of all want to thank you for participating. I know that there were a lot of challenges and I really hope that you enjoyed these challenges and that you've learned some things along the way. I'd like to invite you to look through all the different drawings that you've made since the beginning of the class, and I want you to rethink about the different things that thing you learned about yourself, about the process of drawing, and about the many ways that you can maybe overcome these inner hurdles and the fear that you've experienced. So if you can take the time to also just write those down for future reference, that would be great because it's always nice to have a visual reminder of these different kinds of things. I also hope that these different techniques that I've taught you, so trying to reframe mistakes, use of non-dominant tan, transform your drawings, close your eyes, go into the unknown, explore, have fun, I hope that these are all things that you've at least started to integrate, and that you'll continue doing this in your further drawings. This is also why I wanted us to have a schedule so that you feel that it's just the beginning of something. You know the one thing that I find super important is that all these things, all these small little techniques that you use, the more you use them, the more you teach yourself that the fear is just constructed. That it's not actually attached to anything real and that you can draw, that you can develop your skills even if you have those fears, even if once in a while you'll start having doubts, oh, this is a stupid drawing. Oh, I don't like this. I'm not good at it. But you'll recognize that and you'll remember, oh, wait, I know this and I know what I can do to counter it. I really hope that you found this class valuable and I'm really looking forward to hearing what you've learned. If you want to share it with any of your friends, that would be great because I have to admit I'm on a personal mission to infuse creativity in everybody, because I feel like there's so many people that would benefit from unleashing through creative selves. Because I think we all have creative selves and I think they're under exploited. I think we don't let them run free. It feels good when you let them run free. I'm also looking forward to your feedback in case I do another class on Skillshare and yeah, happy drawing. 15. Other classes: If you're curious to see when my next class is coming out, then be sure to click on the follow button in my profile which should be over here, I think, and other than that, if you're looking for me, I'm on all the social media. I'm on Instagram, I'm on YouTube, I'm on Patreon, where I also do really fun like, live drawing sessions, where we kind of hang, and share music and talk about random things. If you want to come and join that, you're welcome to join me there. I also have five DB six other classes. If you're curious to see them, you can check them out in my profile, I have classes that range from growing plants and leaves, and growing your visual library. I have one that's about abstract water color painting, and how you can do things that are more planned, or that are more free form. I have another one that is a fearless art challenge a 14-day drawing challenge with many different prompts. I have one about the brush pen, which is one of my most favorite tools. And I think I've said them all. Have I said them all? In any case, I hope to see you in any of those classes, or on Instagram, or Patreon, or YouTube or whatever else. And I wish you all the best in your creative endeavors,I'll see you soon.