How to improve overall drawing skills?

Question from Rebecca

“I’d really like to improve my overall skill level – particularly in the areas of portrait drawing. I’ve always loved working with color, so I usually skip to the painting stage as quickly as I can. I have really struggled to build my drawing skills, which I feel is holding me back from improving to levels I’d like to achieve.

What are the best techniques to practice and improve overall drawing skills?”

Dear Rebecca,

Good painting is well drawn. In painting realistic artworks, skipping drawing is like skipping to the wall-decorating stage before a house has been built properly. No lick of paint will improve a shakily build construction.

Coming back to your question about what exercises to do to improve drawing skills, it depends on your current level of skills. In many cases, self-taught artists have to start from very basic exercises – how to sharpen a pencil and how to hold it in the right way. Unfortunately, such primary skills are not taught in art colleges these days.

Then comes the task of how to handle a pencil so it becomes not a tool in your hand that you have to control but a continuation of your mind, when every line comes out as intended without even thinking about it.

There are also indispensable topics in drawing that an art student must learn and exercise, like linear and aerial perspective, principles of constructive drawing, and understanding contours.

You may check this video lesson to begin with:
//drawingacademy.com/help-i-cant-draw

Drawing exercises should go from easy to more advanced tasks – from drawing flat shapes to three dimensional geometrical objects, organic objects, draperies, still-life, interior and exterior drawing, landscapes and cityscapes.

Painting by Natalie Richy, Old Masters Academy tutor

After that, an art student can continue with learning human anatomy and the proportions of a human body, drawing classical casts – portraits, busts, full-size sculptures – and advancing to life drawing, portraits and figures. Dressed figures and multi-figure compositions are considered the top of educational cycle, after which self-education by practice will continue for the lifetime.

Whatever your current level of drawing skills, you will find the Drawing Academy course very helpful in improving them.

Best regards,

Vladimir London
Drawing Academy tutor

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