Part 3: Exercises

Imagine you are a boxer preparing for a fight. You would train hard for your fight. You’d lift weights and do calisthenics to build strength and power. You’d jump rope to improve your quickness and run long distances to build endurance. You’d want each of these abilities to be as strong as possible so you could depend on them during the fight. We can approach drawing in the same way. Your artwork is your fight, and exercises are your training.

Exercises help build fundamental art skills through experience. A well-designed exercise creates a complete learning cycle. It gives you a clear goal, a plan to follow, and a way to evaluate how well you met that goal. You can then use what you learned as feedback to improve your next attempt.

For example, the cross-contour exercise challenges you to draw a subject by wrapping lines around its surface to describe its form. You’ll know exactly what you are trying to achieve as you draw, and you can judge how well your lines describe the subject’s forms and surfaces. If the forms are unclear, you will often be able to tell why and how to correct them next time. Through this process, you gain experience thinking about form, surfaces, and how to describe them with lines. These skills will carry over into your next drawing, whether from life or imagination.

Exercises make great warm-up drawings. Their clear and simple goals help you start working right away with less mental effort. Beginning with an exercise also prepares your mind to focus on a specific skill that can carry over to your next drawing.

The ten exercises that follow are designed to strengthen the skills used in drawing from life. Each one isolates a specific skill as much as possible so you can focus on it without being distracted by other skills. They are grouped by whether they focus on form, position, or light. This helps you choose which exercise will be most useful for your current challenges. For instance, if you struggle with rendering light, a value transition exercise or five-value study may help. I have many more exercises like these in my free how to draw book.

Form

Blind Contour

This exercise trains you to observe and draw contours carefully. Contours are the edges of a surface that you could imagine touching.

Begin by focusing your eye on a point along the contour of your subject. Slowly follow that contour with your eye, and at the same time, move the tip of your pen or pencil across the page in the same motion. Imagine the tip of your pen is touching the point you are looking at as your eye moves along the edge. Do not look at your page while drawing. When your eye reaches the end of a contour, choose another one and repeat the process. You may glance at your page only to choose a new starting point for your next stroke. Repeat this as many times as you like.

Your drawing will likely look messy and inaccurate, and that is perfectly fine. The goal is not to make a good drawing but to train your observation. Evaluate your work based on how closely your eye followed the contour and how much it felt like your pencil was following the edge of your subject.

As my eye follows the contour, I move my pencil in the same path on my page. I try to imagine that my pencil is touching the contour.

These hands are drawn with blind contours.

Cross-contour

This exercise builds on the blind contour exercise, but instead of drawing the outer edges, you will now draw contours that move across the surface of the form.

Start by choosing a point on the outside edge of your subject. Move your eye across the surface, perpendicularly to the outer edge, as if tracing the path of an insect crawling over the object. Let your pen follow the movement of your eye just as before. When your eye reaches the opposite edge, choose a nearby point and repeat the process. Imagine your object is striped with parallel lines that wrap around its surface. Evaluate your drawing by how convincingly your lines appear to wrap around the form. Do not worry if your proportions are off, since that is not the focus of this exercise.

My eye and pencil move across the surface to wrap around the form.

This example of cross-contour was done with colored pencil on paper.

CSI Lines

An artist’s line quality is like their handwriting. It has a major impact on the look and feel of a drawing. Confident and consistent lines tend to be more appealing than hesitant or scratchy ones, so it is important to practice your line control.

Although line quality improves naturally with experience, it can be practiced deliberately as well. Work on drawing smooth, controlled lines. C-curves, S-curves, straight lines, and circles are often considered pleasing. C-curves are lines that curve in one direction, like a letter ‘C’. S-curves curve in one direction then curve in the opposite direction like a letter ‘S’. Drawing with your whole arm, especially from the shoulder, will produce longer, smoother lines than drawing only from the wrist or fingers. Practice drawing the same line repeatedly, either directly over it or parallel to it. This helps train precision and consistency. Many artists, myself included, use line practice as a daily warm-up. The more you practice, the more naturally confident your lines will become.

CSI Line Drawing

In this exercise, follow a contour with your eye as you did in the blind contour exercise, but do not draw immediately. Instead, pause to think about how to best represent the path your eye followed using a C-curve, S-curve, or straight line. Once you have decided, draw it on your page. You may look at your page while drawing. Some contours may be complex and require multiple lines to capture. In those cases, plan the combination of C-curves, S-curves, and straights you need before drawing them.

With practice, this decision-making process will become automatic. You can work with both outside contours and cross-contours. Evaluate your drawing based on how well your lines follow the contours and surfaces of your subject. Again, it is fine if your proportions are off. The goal is to train your eye and line control, not accuracy.

Position

Visual Measurement

Choose a complex subject with many parts for this exercise. A still life with several objects or an entire room works well. As you draw a rough sketch, use the visual measurement techniques found in part 2 to find the relative positions of the different parts of your subject. Start with the larger forms first, such as the walls and ceiling if you are drawing a room, before moving on to smaller details. Think of the process like solving a puzzle, using the sizes and positions you have already established to find where everything else fits. Evaluate your drawing by how accurately the relative positions of the parts of your subject appear.

Checking A Gesture

Begin with a gesture drawing of your subject. A gesture is a quick drawing that focuses on the whole of the subject rather than the details. Once you have your gesture, use visual measurement techniques to check its proportions and make any necessary corrections. Assess your results by how closely the proportions in your drawing match those of your subject.

I use the height of the head as my unit of measure to compare the distances horizontally and vertically in my subject and my gesture. I use horizontals and verticals to find more features and check my work.

Light

Value Scale

A value scale is a tool that organizes the full range of light to dark that a medium can produce into evenly spaced steps, often around nine. Assigning numbers to these steps makes it easier to describe and compare the relationships between light and dark in your work.

Creating a value scale is an excellent way to learn control of your medium and practice producing specific values. Start by dividing a rectangle into nine equally sized squares. Fill the square on one end with the darkest value your medium can produce, and the square on the other end with the lightest, which may be the white of the page. Next, fill the remaining squares with values that gradually transition between light and dark, spacing them as evenly as possible in the value range. The value in each square should be equally different in value from the neighboring squares. You may need to make adjustments as you go. Evaluate your results by how evenly the values are spaced in the value range and how consistent the value in each square appears.

This value scale was made with ballpoint pen.

Value Transition

Practice controlling your medium by creating smooth transitions between areas of value. The goal is to create a soft gradient that moves evenly from light to dark. Avoid streaks, blotches, or uneven patches. Evaluate your work by how smooth and consistent your transitions appear.

Three Value Study

Create a drawing of your subject using only three distinct values. Remember that the blank page counts as one of them. You may start with a light sketch of your subject, but avoid focusing on detailed outlines.

Begin by dividing your subject into areas of light and shadow. Use one of your lighter values to separate the subject from the background. If the white of the page is your lightest value, use your middle value for the subject. If the page is your middle value, use the lighter value for the subject instead. Use the darkest value to represent shadow areas. Keep each area consistent and avoid blending between values. Evaluate your drawing by how accurately the value shapes describe the light and shadow areas of your subject.

I use the lightest value to divide my subject from my background and my darkest value to describe light and show.

Five Value Study

Begin with a three-value study. Add a darker value within the light areas of your subject and another darker value within the shadow areas. The dark value in the light areas should still be lighter than the lightest value in the shadows. Keep each value area clean and consistent, and do not blend between them. Evaluate your drawing by how accurately the value shapes describe the light and shadow areas of your subject.