With all the spare time you have to spend at home, you might have considered learning several skills through online classes. One of the most popular topics is drawing. Almost anyone can draw, although our skill levels may vary from person to person. Fortunately, you can easily learn how to improve drawing skills with the tips shared in this article.
Benefits of learning to draw
Before digging into the tips on improving drawing skills, let us first look at why you should start learning to draw. There are several reasons why drawing is popular among students in the online community. It is fun, therapeutic, and has a whole host of benefits for mental health and new skills development.
Self-expression
Drawing is a means of expressing oneself through visual representation. This gives the artist the type of creative freedom that allows them to release pent-up emotions healthily. Self-expression has a host of other benefits that follow, such as reducing the amount of stress a person feels.
Stress reduction
As a benefit of expressing oneself, people who draw can experience some relief from the stress of everyday life. Drawing allows you to create a world of your own and escape from the worries of the real world. You can easily release the stress you are feeling through shapes and colors or go into your own world of fantasy and creativity with the art of drawing.
Positivity
Along with reducing stress and the release of negative emotions, a person who draws may experience an increased sense of optimism and positivity. This becomes even more evident as you continue to evolve, develop, and improve your drawing skills. Creating good drawings can give a person a good-feeling sense of accomplishment, further increasing feelings of self-worth and self-love.
Improved emotional intelligence
Art can give a person a deeper sense of self-awareness and control over one’s emotions. Drawing is a healthy way of expressing emotions. It allows you to recognize the things you feel you may otherwise be unable to express verbally. As a result, you may feel more empathetic towards others and more able to keep your emotions in check whenever you feel overwhelmed.
Hand-eye coordination
A physical benefit you can gain from learning to draw has better hand-eye coordination. You will find that you have more control over your fine motor skills and hand gestures and experience fewer accidents when handling everyday things. Your improved dexterity can also increase your confidence, and you’ll likely see a difference in how you carry yourself.
Improved creativity
Drawing allows you to bring out your inner artist and encourages you to become more creative. When you practice drawing, you will also find out that you can get more creative in other things, such as finding new ways to do things or finding better approaches for different situations.
Problem-solving
Because you become more creative with the act of drawing, you will also likely find problem-solving a whole lot easier because of all the different ways you know how to tackle an issue. Think of drawing as a practice session for your brain on the process of creation.
You may encounter several challenges in drawing, such as shading to cast the right shadows, combining lines and angles to come up with a cohesive form, or choosing the right colors to translate what you think and feel into your drawing. These challenges force your brain to think more analytically and thus, improves your problem-solving skills.
Better memory
All of that brain exercise is actually proven to boost your memory. People who suffer from Alzheimer’s or other memory problems are encouraged to practice artistic activities such as drawing to help them with their recall. Even if you don’t suffer from a memory problem, you can still enjoy the perks that art and drawing can have on your ability to remember and recall things.
Better communication skills
You might think that because drawing does not necessarily involve talking, it may not have any part in communication. The fact is that communication is something that you will notice improvement on with the help of drawing.
Drawing connects you to your inner emotions and thoughts and helps you translate them into images. In the process, you become more in-tune with your inner voice and more able to recognize your own feelings. As a result, you can translate them into your own words and interpretations for other people to understand.
Attention to detail
Good drawings have a lot of detail to them. There are no fixed criteria when it comes to art as creativity is limitless, but you will find that you notice little differences and subtleties in images when you look at them or try to draw them. Details are what usually separate professional artists from novices.
This level of attention to detail can translate into your work and everyday life. You can become a better performer on the job or a much more organized person as you strive to become a better artist.
How to improve your drawing skills
If you have already begun your drawing journey and want to get better, here are a couple of tips you can try.
Practice
This may be the most cliche advice you can get from almost any artist. However, there is a reason as to why teachers so generously dole out this tip to beginners. Drawing is a skill. It involves the use of your mind and your body. That means that you have to do it repeatedly, making little improvements along the way, for you to become adept at it.
For some artists, practicing is a way to make themselves more familiar and comfortable with the act of drawing. For more experienced artists, it is a way to keep their creative juices flowing. For most, it is like regularly running your vehicle so that the parts don’t get rusty.
There are several simple ways to practice drawing skills as a beginner. You can try out drawing basic lines and shapes for starters. Later on, you can play with shapes and lines to form patterns. While learning different techniques, you can also do some freehand doodling just to let your imagination run free without overthinking about the method you are supposed to apply.
Appreciate other artists
The easiest way to gain inspiration is to observe other artists’ work. Try to notice all of the small details, the strokes made, the colors, the techniques possibly used to achieve such an effect. It would be equally inspiring to watch other artists while they work. In this manner, you would not need to decipher techniques within the work, but rather see them in action.
You can find inspiration from art galleries, expos of new and upcoming professional artists, and art museums to view the masterpieces of old. There are also several videos of artists working on their pieces online. You can learn from appreciating those as well.
Copy other drawings
You might feel a bit iffy with copying, but it is actually encouraged in the drawing sphere. It’s like dance choreographies on TikTok. Everyone copies them to either practice or show off their dance skills. As long as you do not claim any copied work as your own, and appropriately credit the original artist, you’re generally okay.
Here are a few tips and insights on copying artwork that you might find helpful in your drawing journey. It might make you feel a lot better to know that a lot of successful artists today started out by copying works of already-established artists.
You can even start out with tracing until you feel more confident about doing a side-by-side copy. It can be of anything as simple as cartoon characters to more serious drawings made by legendary artists like Michaelangelo.
Copy photographs
If you’re up for a challenge, you can graduate from drawing illustrations to drawing photographs. Since photos are clearer, more accurate, and more detailed, it expands your capabilities beyond what you are used to. Moreover, it develops your eye for detail. Having a photograph as a subject is also less complicated as photos are everywhere, they do not easily spoil. Unlike human and animal subjects, they never move or get tired.
Luckily, photographs are readily accessible and very abundant nowadays. You can find them online, on your phone, in magazines, advertisements, and still-images created by artistic and editorial photographers.
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Draw from real life
Drawings from real life are probably the most represented drawings in the media. In movies and ads, you can often see artists drawing live landscapes in parks or beaches. It is also common to witness a scene of an artist drawing human subjects.
There is a reason why live model drawing is so popular. It is like you are translating what you see in front of you into the paper. If you attend an actual drawing class wherein a model is at the center of a group of students, each artist will have a different angle of the model. Each artist will also have different styles, skill levels, and interpretations. It is like witnessing an event and later on telling a story about it in your own language, tone of voice, and interpretation of events.
Learn from professionals
There are several resources available today that allow even inexperienced beginners to learn fundamental drawing skills. Physical classes are optimal, but online courses are the next best thing. Luckily, you have a broad range of choices when it comes to accessing drawing classes online. Here are a few of the newest beginner-friendly drawing classes by Skill Success:
The Art and Science of Drawing: Basic Skills
Learn basic drawing skills no matter what medium you work with.
Drawing Masterclass For Absolute Beginners
A complete beginner-friendly masterclass that teaches you everything you need to know about drawing.
Drawing Cartoony Characters
Start making cartoon characters as a fun and easy way to get into the art of drawing.
How to Improve Your Figure Drawing: Step by Step
This course will take you by the hand and guide you through a step by step process of figure drawing.
Keep a sketchbook
To track your progress and see how you improve your drawing skills over time, do all of your practices in a sketchbook. Keeping a sketchbook is handy. It can serve as a reminder for you to practice daily. It is an ever-ready canvas where you can pen down your inspirations any time you want. Most importantly, it visually demonstrates how you are growing as an artist.
As you learn new things, you get to apply new techniques. You will notice subtle and stark changes, the more techniques you acquire and practice. With a sketchbook, you can begin developing your own style unique to every artwork you produce. You can start creating masterpieces that uniquely identify you and set you apart from all other artists.
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