Drawing Exercise: Textures With a Pen
When I was at university, you’d have these trimesters where you’d have an exam period at the end. Usually, we’d cram for the exams a week before the exam, and what worked well was to go to the university library. It was silent there. People all around you were studying. We didn’t have mobile phones or laptops even back then. All you had was that book in front of you, a pen, and a pad to write on. You were sitting in that seat, and the only thing you could do was study or be bored doing nothing. And so you started studying.
Make it easier to do the right thing and more challenging or impossible to do the wrong thing.
Create a space where you can work. Place drawing tools ready to draw with at any moment. Clean that space from distractions; allow only drawing tools, art, and books that inspire you to draw. If you need electronic devices for your creative process, try making digital distractions inaccessible.
A space where the tools you need to create art are near you, and distractions are as far away as possible.
I write my newsletters ahead of time. I can do that because, hopefully, the tips are timeless, and the drawing exercises are timeless, too.
But it’s interesting to reflect on this week, too. Someone suggested on our Discord that we could also use the art flashcard images for timed drawing sessions. And so I made that.
Here are two A4 pages of timed three-minute sketches.
I’m having great fun with the timed drawing and art flashcards. It feels like developing a game! Long ago, I read an interview with Peter Molyneux in which he said he’d set up the game dynamics and let the team develop the graphics while he played the game endlessly. He said he’d played the game himself for 10,000 hours when it was finally released.
You find out if something you made doesn’t work if you try it out yourself, and so I have been fine-tuning my two new toys, the Art Flashcards and Time Drawing page. I added a pause and next button to the timed drawing page; if I feel the need for it, you will likely do so, too.
Timed drawing is more fun. It feels less ambitious in a way: you can only draw very quickly, so there is no chance the drawings will come out “nice.” At the same time, you are learning at a high pace. The Art Flashcards feel like hard work in comparison, but they are nice in that they force me to slow down and sit with one reference for longer.
The cool thing is that, with the Art Flashcards and Timed Drawing page, I don’t have to think about what to draw. I just open one of the pages, and there’s a reference image for me to use. This dovetails nicely with the theme of this week’s article! Design your workspace so you can not help but be productive. It helps if you have a web page that instantly presents an image for you to use for drawing reference.
That’s been my week, using art flashcards, timed drawing, sharing on Discord, and fine-tuning these pages.
How was your week? Share on Discord!