Drawing Drills

What are drawing drills?

Drawing drills are simple, yet technical, exercises that will help cultivate a precision skill set and elevate your drawing abilities over time. Initially, drawing drills are going to be a big part of your focus mostly because, although simple in nature, they do take time and practice to master. You should be practicing these drills at the start of every drawing session, and will lead to improved drawing skills over time. At the very beginning of your drawing journey you may want to spend a good amount of time practicing your drills while also studying and drawing for fun. As your abilities improve you can ween this down to the first couple minutes during your drawing session as an easy way to warm up.

Don’t Inflate the Importance, however.

While these drills are important it is imperative that you DO NOT obsess over them. They don’t need to be mastered before you continue learning. Just take some time to understand and practice them at the start of your drawing session and they will help you to improve your mastery one day at a time. Art is not about perfection, we as humans rarely ever achieve perfection. Art is about communicating an idea or a story. Our goal here, is to be a more effective storyteller - not a perfectionist. 

Preparation

To prepare, you will want to set up your space with inexpensive paper, so I still suggest newsprint but you can use scrap paper, as we will be using a fair bit of it. You want your space to be open to ensure you have a good range of motion and the freedom to move around so you can work from your elbow and shoulder, not your wrist. Keep in mind everything we’ve discussed so far, such as what part of your arm you are using to draw, as well as your pencil grip. It’s good to practice using different pencil grips so that they become easier to use over time. You may sit or stand, either is acceptable, but you will want to feel comfortable. 

You can do these exercises digitally, but you will have much less room to maneuver. Doing them traditionally with large sheets of paper will be more effective in helping you to learn to draw with not just your elbow but your shoulder as well.