In this article I tell you how to improve drawing skills! Drawing is something nearly everyone likes to do! It’s a kind of language to express yourself, your thoughts and your feelings. Like it’s always said: A picture says more than 1000 words. But how you can improve your drawing skills? Here I give you some advices!
Use your right side of the brain for drawing
Why is that important?
That’s easy to answer! Your right side of the brain is responsible for creativity! So you need to activate it to get much better in drawing!
How to do that?
You need to train that! But it’s not about meditation! These are drawing lessons you have to do regularly. Maybe that’s a good point to start a sketchbook 🙂
There’s a very good book available for this topic. It’s called “Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain” by “Betty Edwards“.
Hint: According to the reviews of the book, it seems that the new versions aren’t as good as the old one. For me I bought a used original version at amazon (they only cost a few euros).
Some exercise examples for all who do not have the book:
- You need a sheet with something on it you want to draw. Then turn this sheet upside down and redaw it *
- Do not draw the thing itself but draw the space around. For example if you draw a chair, do not draw the chair but draw the empty space around it so you get the silhouette of the chair. *
- Draw with music in the background or turn on the TV while drawing.
- Draw what you see, not what you think you have to see!
These recommendations seem to be weird but they have a reason!
We all learn to use our left side of the brain because it’s responsible for logical thinking. Normally school trains this part much more than the right one. Therefore it always wants to take control. The left brain tries to tell you how something is looking (because logically it has to look like that) but in most cases this thing is not really looking like this. And that’s why some pictures turn out so bad! Because you do not draw what you see, you draw what your left brain thinks you have to draw.
The key is to either to
- make your left brain busy (for example with music in background) so it can’t interrupt while you are drawing
- confuse it (for example by turning your picture upside down)
Do these exercises regularly to improve you skills!
Do all your drawings using a permanent marker or something you cannot erase
This is a advice you will hear quite often. But why?
That’s easy. If you draw a line wrong then your eye can see that and the information in forwarded to you brain and can be processed. Your brain recognizes that the movement was not fully correct and remember this for the next try. If you erase the line your brain does not really process the information because after erasing your eyes recognize that it’s fine again and do not forward the information that the line was originally wrong.
I can only tell you that this improved my skills pretty much! There are many drawings which you will throw away because they are looking ugly because you were not able to erase the lines but after regularly training there won’t be the need to erase any more 😉 You will see!
I hope you enjoyed this article!
♥ Keep on drawing! – Starlene ♥
* this video was not done by me. It’s a video you can find on youtube.