These Exercises Increase Your Drawing Abilities

By Author: Ruediger Schmidt
Total Articles: 35
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Once you start learning to draw, soon you realize: a major part of this art is just craftsmanship and technique. Once you are proficient in the basic techniques, your creativity can rely on this foundations. This gives you more freedom to develop your drawing skills and imagination instead of concentrating on employing the basic techniques properly.
Therefore it's a good idea to practice these basic drawing techniques on a regular basis. Especially as you are beginning to learn to draw, a lot of practice of these basic techniques will quicken your drawing success.
Learn to Draw Hatchings and Crosshatchings
Hatching means to draw many parallel running lines approximately. In difference to normal shadings the lines must not touch eachother! Although there is still white space between the lines they build an region seemingly shaded strongly.

Cross-hatching takes it one step further. When you are doing cross-hatching you cover one group of hatchings with an additional group orthogonal to the first one. Thus cross hatchings get a lot denser and solider than (single) hatchings.
Drawing hatchings ...
... calls for precision. So exercising hatchings is also a great chance to exercise your drawing precision. When starting begin to fill empty sheets of paper with hatchings and cross-hatchings not having a concrete depicted object in your eye.
Once you've gained some technique, you should seek first simple subjects. Pick out such scenes that contain enough shadow. Try to reproduce this scenery without using outlines. Rather rely entirely on translating the darknesses and dark areas into hatchings. Let the hatchings' alignment follow the objects you are drawing. For drawing blacker areas and darknesses place the lines of your hatching nearer to each other or use cross hatching.

Learn to Create Shadings

Drawing shadings is more common than hatching. It is more instinctual and needs less skills. When drawing shadings you merely fill areas of your drawing with your pencil. By varying your pencil's softness, the pressure you apply and the count of layers of shadings you produce you manage the shades you create.
Like when creating hatchings you'll draw shadings by drawing lots of lines. This time you draw them so dense to one another they intersection and blend entirely. Shadings made out of lines still have a alignment (though not as strong as in hatchings). So be aware to align your shadings' alignment with the shapes of the objects you are drawing. To make the shading more dense you have to apply the same techniques as when doing cross hatching.
A different way for drawing shadings requires to draw lots of really small scribbles or circles close together so they merge and blend. Blendings made this way are highly even and miss a hidden direction. The advantage: you won't have to keep an eye on the shading's hidden direction.
Best you start exercising shadings instantly. Take some sheets of paper, sketch some bare forms like triangles and start to fill them with shadings. Try to make them as smooth as imaginable and use the different techniques explained before.
Once again once you have achieved enough levels of expertise, seek to begin using the techniques learned on real-world sceneries.

Use Various viewpoints and types of perspective

In addition to doing shadings and hatchings the most crucial technique you need to know while commencing to learn drawing, is a sound understanding of perspective.
There are some principles that can help you in building perspectively correct drawings. But first it is necessary you practice your eye to recognize basic structures.
Pick out easy sceneries largely containing of straight lines and not too much curves. And then draw those subjects by drawing exclusively the outline. This way you are able to concentrate on understanding dimensions and perspective. But do not stop here, repeat this practice by drawing the same subject again and again from different viewpoints.
You'll see with every repetition you will understand the scene better and your ability to understand and picture the dimensions of any subject will improve outstandingly.

And What Next?

These three practices are the most important when learning to draw. There are further basic skills and formulas you could and should train. You can learn your drawing skills by yourself - simply get and draw real sceneries. Begin with simple ones and step-up the level of difficulty while you make progress.

Also you can learn drawing employing practices designed and tested to ensure ideal progress for your drawing abilities.
This is another part of the six element series on how to learn drawing and drawing in general. Visit the upcoming part to learn to draw .
Here you can also get a free ebook on learning to draw.