Loosen up Your Hands and Eyes With These 7 Drawing Exercises
Drawing is so much more than just plonking marks down onto paper. It’s about finding the materials that you enjoy using; deciding on style and size. It’s putting in the hours of practice and accepting the pieces you rip up in a fit. Sometimes it’s about stepping away and giving yourself a break or trying a new approach so you can get back to the place where you enjoy drawing.
Many artists swear by using warm-ups to get themselves prepared mentally and physically to draw. Whether you want to adopt a warm-up ritual or just try these drawing exercises for practice, they are useful for stretching your drawing muscles and growing your creative practice.
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The Exercises
We’ll start with the easy ones. Maybe you’ve tried these already, but it absolutely never hurts to give them a whirl again. In fact, you might be surprised when you try these how much they loosen you up and ground you. Many of these will help you get back to a place where you are more present when you draw. That’s always a helpful thing. 🙂
Blind Contour Drawing
I HAVE to start with this one, so stop rolling your eyes just because you see this everywhere. Blind contour drawing is such an amazing practice for getting your hands to catch up to what your brain is telling your eyeballs you are seeing. You are basically visually tracing a form and willing your hand to keep up.
Here’s how you do it: grab a piece of paper and a drawing utensil. Decide on what you will draw: your face in the mirror or an object in front of you are good places to start. Without looking at the paper, you are drawing the most simplified versions of what you see. Basically this means the outline, but you’ll be adding some inner details as you see fit. For instance, if you are making a blind contour drawing of your face, you’ll naturally want to dip into the outline of the head to draw basic eyes/nose/mouth.
Apparently I didn’t have any hair for the first one I drew, and a weird floppy dog ear for the second.
Draw With Your Non-Dominant Hand
This has the effect of slowing you down and forcing you to re-learn to draw. You will be surprised at how much more you focus on what you are drawing when you are absorbed in the basics of how to even hold the dumb pencil. 😆
Use this exercise regularly, even just for a little bit at a time, to remind your brain to focus, but with the understanding that you won’t be drawing at the same level as your other hand. Lean into the silliness of this exercise, and give that non-dominant hand a high five afterward with the dominant hand and you can all have a good laugh.
Trace Stuff
Yasss, queen. Trace things; so many things, but really quickly and loosely. Either use the old hold-it-up-to-the-window method, or try the cool superflat light board I use, and just trace shapes, photos, your own drawings, anything to get your hand gliding all over the paper.
Draw Cubes and Spheres and Cones
Remember the first time you learned how to draw a 3d cube? I still freaking love drawing those things, and they are a regular part of my random doodling habit. Draw a pile of 3D cubes, spheres, cones, and what-have-you’s on the paper and enjoy the simple act of drawing cool things you already know how to draw.
If you want to go totally bonkers, throw in a little bit of shading here and there. Since I was using Sharpie, I employed the extremely fun technique of crosshatching. Play around with different crosshatch lines in each shape!
Doodle
If you are used to drawing very carefully, either what you see or have perfectly planned out in your head, doodling may seem frivolous. Like a waste of time. But nothing loosens you up more than randomly drawing without thinking. It may feel nearly impossible at first of you aren’t used to it, but challenge yourself to fill up a couple of pages with the most random scribbles, shapes, patterns, lines, marks. Just start drawing and don’t let yourself stop. This is sort of like the art version of the morning pages from The Artist’s Way.
[Here are some awesome artist date ideas if you are working through The Artist’s Way.]
Draw With Both Hands at Once
I drew a, ahem, beer bottle, because one just happened to be sitting in front of me now how did that get there. I held the Sharpies loosely in my hands and drew that beer bottle slowly and at the same time. It was like synchronized swimming but with drawing.
The best part? POOF I now have 2 beers. Prost!
Shade With the Side of a Pencil, but Draw no Lines
Well, I remember when I first tried this, and my little mind was blown. Up until then I had just been drawing big awkward lines on the paper and then setting about trying to fill them in or make them look not so boring line-y.
Approaching drawing by focusing on the shadows is a fascinating way to warm up for a little bit. And if you’re totally cool and use a Sharpie like me, you’ll still try doing this. Show me what you come up with!
Do you see the through line here? All of these drawing exercises are designed to get you out of your head and right onto the page where you are freely and joyfully drawing your little heart out before you focus down on whatever else you want to draw.
Any time you can remember to inject a little play into your art practice, you will benefit a millionfold. (That number is accurate.)