The Basics

Curve Drills

The natural progression of the line is the curve, and just like the line, confidence is key. When we are working on our drawing skills, we need to achieve a strong balance between speed and accuracy. If you are going too fast you lose accuracy, and if you are going too slow, you are going to lose accuracy. So the way you become confident in your line work is to find a speed that naturally flows from your arm and achieves the accurate line you are looking for.

These exercises are really great for improving your linework because very often you’ll find that individual lines can be broken down into a series of straight, curved, or s-curved lines and being able to control these three types of lines you’ll have more control over what your lines say about the type of story or the type of information you are trying to portray to the viewer. 

C-Curves

C-Curves are a simple arching curve that resemble the letter “C”. As shown below, the direction, flow, and weight of the curve can, not only be very descriptive, it can also be easily changed depending on where you put the emphasis of the curve. The examples portray where the energy of the arch is focused and can provide a lot of information to the viewer when used within the larger context of a drawing.  If you think of a figure, a curved line like a C-Curve can show what direction that figure is moving towards using this line. 

Exercise Six

We are going to be approaching this exercise the same way we did exercise 4, which was Over Laying, so we are going to use that same technique here. We want to focus on having the ability to achieve specific lines quickly and accurately so that we can thoughtlessly rely on our instinct to tell a story. The point of the assignment is to trace the curve ten times doing your best to keep your lines as close to the example as possible. This means that you want to do your very best at reaching each dot as closely as you can. Remember, the goal is for your curves to disappear into one another so that your accuracy is such that you can’t even tell that the line was traced multiple times.