3 Drawing Exercises that are Actually Fun: Tips from Lynn Whipple
Lynn Whipple (Ep.23) knows people can feel like drawing is overwhelming and difficult.
She has a solution: “Let's just make it fun.”
And that’s important. Drawing is a necessary part of painting. If you want to paint loosely, a solid drawing will allow you to paint looser. If your goal is realism, drawing is important as well.
But not all drawing practice has to be slow and careful. If you want to get better at drawing then it’s important to find a way to make it fun. That’s just the kind of challenge that Lynn Whipple is willing to take on.
Here are 3 exercises Whipple suggests to help make drawing more fun.
Drawing Exercise #1: The Non-Dominant Hand Exercise
OK, righties, move that tool to the left. And southpaws, move north. This is about letting go of the control and expectations that come when drawing with your dominant hand. Make sure you’re looking at your subject matter and now get to work rendering what you see. But make sure to keep your mark making tool in your non-dominant hand the entire time.
By letting go of your expectations around realism (because non dominant hand, right?) you’ll spend more time looking and getting to know your subject and your drawing will be looser.
Drawing Exercise #2:The Two-Handed Drawing Exercise
If your dominant hand is itching to get back into the game, Wipple has got you covered with the two-handed drawing exercise. Here’s how it works. Grab a warm color mark making tool in one hand and a cool color tool in the other hand and draw with both hands simultaneously while looking at your subject matter.
You won’t be able to exact the same kind of control as you normally do drawing with purely your dominant hand. It’s near impossible to get tight working this way. Bonus, you'll have warm playing against cool which will add immediate interest for the eye.
Drawing Exercise #3: The 15-Second Drawing Exercise
Go grab a timer and get ready to move fast. This time you’ll be using your dominant hand but you won’t give it time to get critical. Have your subject matter ready and then set the timer and go. Draw whatever you can get in for 15 seconds. Do several of these in a row. Now up the time to 30 seconds. Draw several in a row.
Now up the time to 45 seconds, etc until you get to 60 seconds. Sixty seconds will now feel like a lifetime. But don’t lose the energy you had with those 15 second drawings. You’ll find that these drawings may feel frantically fast but they are also insanely fun.
Why these exercises will help you get better at drawing
Learning to draw can be especially tough because we have expectations about our skill level. Often it takes a while for what we want to produce to align with what we physically can produce. That can be frustrating. It can also give our inner critique a lot of fodder to throw and with enough angry self talk, we quilt.
Whipple’s drawing exercises are meant to keep the inner critic off balance (and hopefully somewhat quiet) as you work on learning to really see- in a way that’s actually fun- the subject matter in front of you.
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