Below are 3 awesome drawing exercises that will improve your drawing skills dramatically. They will help boost your observational skills, accuracy, speed and confidence! Practice them everyday until they become a habit.
1. Break it Down!
Have you ever tried to draw what you thought was a simple object and then after all your hard work, you realize it’s lop sided? Hey, I feel for ‘ya. This exercise can greatly increase your drawing speed by providing you with a structure to build upon from the very start, instead of having to define it each step of the way.
Take Action: Gather together a bunch of uniquely shaped objects. Before you even pick up your pencil, use your imagination to break each object down into basic shapes. Once the shapes solidify themselves in your mind, do a light sketch followed by contour lines to better define the shape of your subject.
Draw your subject on a straight vertical or horizontal line to help with alignment.
2. Observe your Subject
Unless you have photographic memory, drawing something or someone without constantly cross-referencing it to your drawing can turn out to be a really bad idea.
When trying to reproduce an image in your head, your brain will make things up or fill in the blanks to compensate for the missing details.
My portrait drawings are usually made from 80% observation and only 20% of actual drawing time. Sounds crazy? If I start to observe less, my drawings will become at least 50% less accurate. This really matters when it comes to drawing people. It pays to observe!
Take Action: Study your subject closely and try to memorize what you see. But let’s say your memory only lasts for 3 seconds. Give yourself only 3 seconds to jot down what you observed. I usually draw no more than 2 strokes before observing my subject again.
Sounds like a slow process? This exercise isn’t about speed. It’s about increasing your observational skills and weeding out errors caused by laziness and lack of commitment. Imagine how much time you would waste if you had to erase your drawing 4 hours in and do it again from the start!
3. Measure
Measuring is an important skill if you want to produce accurate, realistic and more convincing drawings. If you practice this frequently enough, you may find that your drawings are super accurate even when drawing freehand (no measuring). You can measure anything from length, width and angle (relationships between things on a slant, horizontal, or vertical axis.
Take Action:
1. Determine how long you want the drawing to be and make boundary lines on your paper
2. Hold your drawing as level as possible or use the paper’s straight edges for vertical and horizontal reference.
3. Hold your pencil straight up in front of the subject.
4. Close one eye and use the tip of the pencil and your thumb as a gauge to measure the length of your subject’s head. In the picture below, the subject’s length is equal to 8 heads. (For the sake of this tutorial, the hand/pencil is off to the side. You ideally want to place your hand directly between your eye and the subject).
5. How can you transfer this information to your drawing? In step 1, you made 2 ticks on your paper. What you want to do is separate the area between these ticks into 8 equal sections lengthwise.
** This method can also be applied horizontally to find the correct width. Similar to step 4, measure the head’s length and then turn your pencil horizontally. You can figure out the width of the head, shoulders, waist, etc.
Measuring Angles
If you were to draw a straight line down the middle of this person’s head, where do you think the line will fall further down the picture? In the gap between his shoes?
The middle of his head is actually vertically aligned with the inner heel of the right shoe. Measuring helps us combat tricky illusions like this!
Can you see how different body parts are related to another in the picture below?
– The right shoulder is vertically aligned with the right buttock
– The left ear is higher than the right
Etc… etc..
While drawing, hold your pencil up to your subject vertically, horizontally or even slanted and carefully move it in front of your drawing to determine, correct or validate your strokes. Make sure you have a steady hand and that your drawing is level.
I could go on and on about measuring angles, but I’ll save that for a more in depth tutorial in the future. Perhaps a video tutorial. Happy Drawing!
Darlene created RFA In 2013 with the goal of sharing simple yet detailed drawing tutorials with other artists on the world wide web. She is a self taught pencil portrait artist and Youtuber.
Hey, Thank you so much for all the videos and tutorials. Your videos and this blog has helped me a lot.
You are a very good teacher.LOVE FROM INDIA…
THANKS AGAIN :)
Thanks for sharing this tutorial and tips it really help me to draw better 🙂
I watch your youtube videos and they really help! Thank you for such great tutorials!
These tutorials are amazing!! You helped me with my drawing talent, thank you. :)
I’ve been using her tutorials for several weeks, awesome support!
I would any books you put out. Do you currently have any books or can you recommend the best book for beginners portrait drawing?
Hi Kathleen, I currently do not have any books out, sorry :( Regarding recommendations, I haven’t actually read any portrait drawing books before so I can’t give you any personal recommendations. However you can find some good books on Amazon by searching and then filtering the results by the rating and number of orders.
I think your tutorials are good enough and high enough drawing quality to be published. Although I am not a publisher so I cant help there your drawings are better than many of the drawing books i’ve read. I think you should make a pdf book I’m sure it would sell even if it wasn’t picked up by a major publisher.
have you never done a self portrait tutorial? i really need to learn how to do one!
No I haven’t done one before. I want to make an ebook on drawing portraits..it might be something I include in the book :)
Is there a way to buy your complete tutorials in one pdf?
I’m not sure how I could save them all into a PDF. You are welcome to download my free tutorials for your own use if you can find a way :)
hey! Your tutorial is very interresting! it will help me because i really want to do portraits as well as you but what is the name of your youtube channel please! and can i have your opinion for my drawings like on email or facebook?
Hi Codi,
My youtube channel is https://www.youtube.com/user/RapidFireArt
You can send me your artwork through the contact page in the top navigation bar :)
This is hard
Thank you for this great information!
I love the tip with the seagull, good stuff!!
hey I want to know is what kind of training is required to draw like pro. i am artist but cant draw like this any suggestion for drawing perfect shapes of faces and other things
They say it takes 10,000 hours of practice to become a master at any craft. In other words, just practice. Make mistakes, learn from them. Follow every tutorial you find, take art lessons, play around see what you create.
There is no right/wrong way to do art or draw realistic figures. This is just one of many methods you could try.
I suggest YouTube for tutorial videos. I’ve learned everything I know from just searching around for different things.