Do you struggle with drawing accurately?
I love shells! Here is a page from my sketch book where I spent about 30 minutes practicing modified contour drawing. This is an easy exercise you can do with 5 to 30 minutes of time.
How do you make a drawing come to life? Are you able to draw from life and capture your subjects in proper perspective? Here are some great tips and pointers to getting you drawing with ease and confidence.
- Start with a subject YOU LOVE! There is nothing more exciting about drawing something you really love and finding out all the fascinating things about it!
- Move the subject around to see it from different angles. Find the most interesting and cool angles.
- Understand the viewpoint and angle of the object being drawn. Ask yourself, is it above, below or at your eye level?
- Do warm up exercises like blind and modified contour drawing techniques to get your observation skills finely tuned. Get to know your subjects better!
- Decide on the best viewpoint and work with it throughout your entire drawing.
- Make sure all of the lines you create in your preliminary drawing have meaning and visually make sense. Is there something that seems awkward or out of proportion?
- Spend time in the drawing phase and correct any drawing errors along the way. It can be frustrating to try to correct drawing errors once you have gone to your final rendition and applied color.
- Need help correcting your mistakes? Place a piece of tracing paper over your drawings to correct and change lines without erasing the entire drawing.
- How will you create volume and form. Do you have a specific light source you will be working with? Scientific lighting can be used to create highlights, middle tones and shadows consistently through out your rendering.
- Do you understand the surface contour of the subject? Create a road map by making an armature drawing to find out the terrain of the subject. This adds in deciding which surfaces are concave and convex.
- Following these steps can greatly enhance your experience drawing. With a little bit of planning you will be on your way to creating your unique vision, creating works on paper you are passionate about.
Most of all enjoy………………. Drawing the Beauty of Nature!
Join me in an online class
What do you find useful when you are drawing? Leave a comment. I would love to hear from you.