Exercises To Improve Your Drawing Abilities

By Author: Ruediger Schmidt
Total Articles: 35
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Once you learn to draw, soon you recognize: the major part of this art is mere technique and craftsmanship. Once you are expert in these basic methods, your creativeness can rely on this foundations. This leaves you more freedom to develop your drawing skills and imagination rather than concentrating on employing the basic methods decently.
Therefore it is a good idea to practice these basic drawing methods on a regular basis. Particularly when you are starting to learn to draw, a lot of exercising these basic methods will speed up your drawing success.

Learn How to Draw Hatchings and Cross-Hatchings

Hatching means to draw a lot parallel running lines close together. In difference to normal shadings the lines are not allowed to touch eachother! Though there's still a small blank space between the lines they form an area seemingly shaded strongly.

Cross-hatching takes it one step further. When you are doing cross-hatching you cover one group of hatchings with an additional group rectangular to the first one. Thus cross hatchings become much thicker and stronger than (single) hatchings.
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... Drawing hatchings requires precision. So practicing hatchings is as well a outstanding chance to train your draftsmanship precision. First commence to fill empty pieces of paper with hatchings and cross-hatchings without a concrete depicted object in your eye.
Once you have gained some proficiency, you should try first simple subjects. Pick out such scenes that contain plenty of shadow. Try to reproduce this scenery without using outlines. Rather trust completely on interpreting the darknesses and dark areas into hatchings. Let the hatchings' alignment follow the objects you are drawing. For drawing darker areas and darknesses place the lines of your hatching nearer to each other or use cross hatching.

You should be learning to Create Shadings

To draw shadings is more usual than hatching. It is more instinctual and needs less skills. When drawing shadings you just fill regions of your drawing with your pencil. By changing your pencil's softness, the pressure you apply and the count of layers of shadings you create you manage the tones you create.
Similar as when creating hatchings you'll draw shadings by drawing lots of lines. For now you draw them so close to each other they overlap and merge completely. Shadings made out of lines still have a alignment (though not as strong as in hatchings). So pay attention to align your shadings' alignment with the forms of the objects you're depicting. To get the shading heavier you can apply the same techniques as when creating hatchings.
A different way for drawing shadings requires to draw lots of really little scribbles or circles close together so they merge and blend. Blendings made this way are highly smooth and miss a hidden direction. The advantage: you don't have to keep an eye on the shading's hidden direction.
Ideally you start practicing shadings instantly. Take some pieces of paper, outline some bare figures like triangles and start to fill them up with shadings. Try to get them as even as possible and use the various methods explained before.
Again when you've reached decent levels of expertise, try to begin employing the techniques acquired on real-world sceneries.

Use Different angles and types of perspective

Besides creating hatchings and shadings the most crucial technique you have to know while commencing to learn drawing, is a sound understanding of perspective.
There are some principles that may help you in building perspectively sound drawings. But first it is necessary you exercise your eye to recognize basic forms and structures.
Pick out easy subjects mostly containing of unbent lines and only few curves. And then draw those subjects by drawing only the silhouette. This way you can focus on understanding proportions and perspective. But don't stop here, repeat this exercise by drawing exactly the same subject over and over again from various angles.
You will see with each repetition you'll understand the subject better and your ability to capture and depict the dimensions of any subject will increase greatly.

What comes Next?

This trio of exercises are the most crucial when studying to draw. There are more basic methods and formulas you might want to learn. You could learn your drawing expertise on your own - simply get and draw real subjects. Begin with simple ones and increase the degree of difficulty as you make progress.

Also you could learn drawing using practices designed and tested to warrant best advancements for your drawing skills.
This is the 4rd article of the six part series on how to learn drawing and drawing in general. Visit the upcoming part to learn how to draw .
Learn to draw today!