Productive Drawing Exercises: Learn How to Control Your Pencil Successfully With These Drawing Tips!

Here are some helpful drawing exercises to start you off! That is, it is imperative that you have a good grasp of basic drawing skills to be a successful artist as these drawing tips are very useful regardless of medium!

After all, I don't expect you to understand the lessons on this site if you can't go beyond drawing a stick-man! That is why this section will focus on some key sketching tips to practice on so you can build up your foundation.

First thing to do is to get comfortable. Grab a desk, a pencil, and a piece of paper. It doesn't have to be fancy materials.

A scrap piece of paper or a simple mechanical pencil is fine. Just use whatever works for you and makes you comfortable.

The second thing is to get rid of distractions. I don't want you to stop your focus. These lessons will take time to master!

Drawing exercises on the line

These drawing tips are to help you control your line art form. On the piece of paper, begin drawing a straight line.

How did it go? Did your hands move a bit slow? Did you have to go back and forth making your line look all fuzzy? Is your line short?

Depending on how you answered those questions, you will need to make some effort on improving drawing the basic line.

This is because the line is an important factor in creating shapes, forming shading, and adding depth.

For this first phase, an ideal line should be fairly straight, long, done in one stroke, and has even pressure throughout the entire length.

After that, try altering your line. For example, try bending the lines to form a curve, zig-zag, spirals, and waves. Try to draw lines that are continuous as much as possible without any breakage!

Work on practicing those drawing concepts to get a good core foundation that you will use for everything you draw!

Excellent resource:

Drawing exercises on pressure

The drawing tips in this section deal with how well you can control your pressure sensitivity. When you first did your line in step one, how hard did you push?

From my own experiences, I found beginners like to push hard on their pencil.

It's not the beginners' fault, though. It came from the need to show clarity when writing that they are used to pushing hard.

We want to get away from showing clarity. In drawing, not showing clarity depicts depth because different values are able to suggest form.

That is, the farther you are from the object, the fainter the object is by creating a desaturated value of that color. This is true for lines. In this lesson, I want you do draw your line again.

This time, go from light pressure sensitivity on one end to hard pressure sensitivity on the other end. Do the reverse.

Make it harder for yourself. Practice going to consecutive sessions of light and hard pressure sensitivity on the same line. Make your lines curve while controlling your hand pressure at the same time.

The benefit is that it allows you to look at any composition through color values and can, therefore, illustrate a sense of depth to create a convincingly drawing.

What type of atmosphere can you do with just simple shading techniques created from practicing pressure?

Drawing exercises on speed

Now that you have an idea on drawing line and controlling the pressure, the next few drawing tips involve speed.

Speed is very important for any artist. For those aiming to be professional digital illustrators, you need to do things fast because your time during the sketch and idea phase is usually unpaid.

You want to minimize this time as much as possible.

Given what you have learned up to this point, you need to combine all the elements in your previous lesson with doing it faster and faster.

Here is your chance to do multiple lines in various values as fast as possible and with a good degree of control. By the end of the lesson, your hands should have gotten a very nice workout!

Test yourself as well. What types of drawings can you do within a given time frame? It's not about creating a finished product.

It is, however, all about creating a tangible composition that your client can accept so you can start with the finishing touches.

Excellent resource:

Drawing exercises on value

Everything up to this point is to help you progress in a way that is natural! Once mastered, the drawing tips for this section is to simply draw using values. There are many ways to draw.

The common method is to draw from reference. In other words, you want to copy or trace the object to get a feel of it. You can start with simple inorganic objects like a cup, a flower vase, or whatever interests you in general.

Only by studying real life object can you really begin building your own imaginative world.

As you draw it as fast as possible, keep in mind its proportions. You want to train your mind to pick up the important parts that make the object what it is rather than worry about the details. It is this type of training that will become useful when you are creating a digital painting from scratch.

If you're having difficulties, try using a grid. A grid will help you break down the values into manageable parts. Then, outline the general shapes and see how it fills out the grid in proportion to other objects.

Of course, your pressure sensitivity exercise will determine the values needed to depict shadows and depth.

See how each of the exercises help? The controlled lines create the shape; the pressure sensitivity helps with depth; the speed will help you focus on multiple experimentation sessions.

Please remind yourself that these drawing exercises are an ongoing learning process. You can never have enough practice.

Once you are adequate with these drawing tips, you can now freely transfer these skills to to other mediums to create beautiful illustrations!

All that is left is to follow along with the lessons on this site carefully to create a convincing portfolio to reach your artistic goals!

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