A Fun Drawing Exercise That Will Jog Your Creativity!

The other primers are about improving fundamental skills: hand dexterity through warm-ups, understanding 3D space through form studies, a general study of what things look like, and improved ability to visualize through drawing from memory.

But all of this should eventually serve the purpose of being creative with it! And that is where this primer comes in.

When we create things, we generally respond to something, to some output. You may see something beautiful that evokes an emotion, and you make a work of art that conveys that feeling.

Our brains are good at seeing patterns in things, which is what this primer will be about. For this, you first need some arbitrary shape. It can be a coffee stain you make in your sketchbook or the form of a cloud in the sky—but hurry! Those clouds slowly change shape—or take the shape of something else you see in front of you.

Feel free to pull multiple drawings from the same shape! Also rotate the shape and try to see something else in it.

It is also a great opportunity to experiment with different drawing tools and drawing styles.

You can also use my random shape generator here. The illustrations accompanying this primer were made with that tool. You can use that if you can’t find arbitrary shapes around you.

One thing you can do is first to draw the shape from memory a few times.

And then try to turn it into something fun! You have a license to deform things. This is about being creative.

For some reason, we become more creative when we limit ourselves. This exercise is a great example of that: instead of having a white paper in front of you to draw anything you want, and not being able to come up with anything, you can force yourself to turn some shape into a drawing of a real person, pose, face, head, vehicle, space ship, et cetera.