Yay!
Hey, Cooper!
Say hello.
Best drawing exercise to improve your drawing skills.
Gosh, there are so many. It's hard to boil down one.
I think looking at the world and turning it into the simplest geometric volumes, boxes
and cones and cylinders and spheres.
I think that's the most valuable.
That's a biased opinion there.
So, there are artists who are gonna tell you otherwise, but that's the one that I didn't
have and that's the one that held me back, and that's the one that holds many people back.
So, I think that's very valuable but it is not enough, I will say that.
It's one of the things that it's like playing the scales effortlessly is essential to being
a competent musician, but it isn't enough.
Best drawing exercise, probably to surprise yourself.
Try drawing anything that takes you outside your comfort zone.
If your figurative artist, or if you think of yourself as a figurative artist,
try and start with landscapes.
Turn landscapes into caricatures.
Try and find ways to use your strategy to draw a convincing grassy hill or a tree or,
you know, an abandoned well.
Do anything that make you comfortable slightly.
You'll find yourself slowly growing more and more comfortable, because comfort level is very
subjective.
You're never really comfortable as an artist but you always need to be turning your hand
towards something else.
The second you start thinking of something as getting easy,
that's when you need to switch subjects.
Start thinking about drawing machinery or rigid bodies.
Start thinking about drawing things in a more dynamic or fluid way.
Things like that.
Anything that you can do to surprise yourself.
And to keep a pencil on you at all times or even better, to try and mix up your media.
Try and become fluent in more than one visual language.
That's what I would recommend.
What drawing exercise do you feel like is really important?
Yeah. Definitely, I love doing life drawings like people on the street, like, cool outfits,
cool clothes, seeing how clothes fit on the body or flow on the body.
And just different expressions to is important, like, what does an angry face look like, a
happy face, laughing.
All stuff like that is really important and I like to do... practice a lot of those.
Do you do mostly quicker life drawings like quick sketch or longer?
Yeah, I like to do quick.
And then, if it's something I just really like, like a really cool-looking outfit or
something, I'll spend more time on it but really quick gesture drawings I think help a lot.
Yeah.
Best drawing exercise, just filling up that sketchbook, just observe, just, again, that
observation and just drawing loosely and just quickly.
I do a thing where it's, like I call it blind feeling sketching, where I'm just...I'm not
even looking at my paper when I'm drawing.
I'm just drawing looking at the person and drawing from feeling and seeing what result
that I get from that, and that's a really helpful exercise.
How long do each one of those run?
So, each one of those, you got to almost, like, capture them within about...less than
about 10 seconds.
You got about 10 seconds not picking up your pencil from your paper and just move around,
and then you can look and see what sort of happy mistakes you've made.
Do you then continue the drawing…?
Then you continue.
Then you start looking at the artwork.
Nice. Okay, cool.
What's the best drawing exercise that you make your students do?
Gesture drawing.
Yeah, it's draw from, you know, draw whatever, draw a head.
Draw this cup.
Gesture of a cup?
Yes, it's not necessarily gesture as in the act, you know, of someone doing a gesture, but
just in how you illustrate.
Loose, free, without a whole lot of thought.
You're saying like capture the idea.
Like, when you say gesture, you mean capture the idea of the thing your drawing?
Yes. Absolutely, yeah.
The cup might not have, like flow.
Yeah, it doesn't have any movement.
But the idea...
You can take an inanimate object and make it animated based on your line.
That's kind of what I'm trying to show them to get them...because the more that you learn
that, then they'll be able to pick up most things, even if it's not "perfect" or the
lines aren't, you know, in a precise kind of way in terms of, like, anatomy and form
and what have you.
Your gesture kind of helps to cloak it to some degree.
As you learn that stuff, then you get better.
Because I have a student right now that, he kind of naturally does the gesture thing.
He doesn't draw correctly yet but his gesture just makes it easier for him to get there.
If that makes sense.
It unifies the whole thing.
It unifies it.
It unifies some kind of design right?
Right.
cool.
Best drawing exercise is drawn from life.
If you see a tree out there...I know, right?
Of course.
If you see a tree, try to replicate that tree on how it looks in space because it is in
space, and we're trying to capture a three-dimensional kind of thing with a 2D skill.
Best drawing exercises to improve the skills, has to be drawing from life and then drawing
from an artist that has the same interpretation of whatever subject you're studying.
And then after that, you practice your own, you know.
So, it's kind of like going to the source, going to an interpretation, and then you making
your own interpretation.
What's the best drawing exercise?
Best drawing exercise.
Well, for draftsmanship it's just drawing straight lines and just so you can do that.
But then, my favorite one is one from the Taiwanese artist, Krenz Cushart, where you
take just a cube and then you rotate it around freehand, no rulers or guidelines or anything.
You rotate it around in 360 degrees.
And then, you can do the same thing by just lifting up the camera and angling it down,
and then bringing the camera below and tilting it up.
And then, the next thing is just take that same exercise but now, draw stuff over it.
So, you could just use a box but then, just draw a car over that box.
Just keep rotating it and practicing it in all different angles.
Nice.
Best drawing exercises that, you know, to help students improve their drawing skills.
All right.
So, this might not be the answer you're looking for here, but the best drawing exercises for
you are those repeated exercises where on your pad you do circles all day.
You do straight lines and you try to draw right back over the straight line.
You make the line go from thin to thick.
You go from S-curves to C-curves and you go from thin to thick on those, light to dark
on those because that's our dexterity.
If you think about, like, a musician.
Really good quality musicians can play an instrument, make it sound like anything.
Your pencil is like that same instrument, and if you can make that pencil look like
anything, you have that same professionalism that those musicians have in your wrist now.
And that's actually more important than knowing how to draw the arm or the leg perfectly.
It's getting those lines in there because, at the end of the day, the anatomy doesn't matter.
It's your personality that shows through and how you speak through your art is you.
And that language comes through in your tools.
That's sort of your dialect as an artist.
Learn that stuff and it'll get you a lot further with the other things because that dexterity
is also how you make the circles better, the straight lines better, measure better, and everything else.
So, what would you say to the people that say that, like, sloppiness is part of their
style and it's them?
I'd say that they're naive, right now, and that they need to learn a little bit more
before they actually answer that question that way.
Because once they understand what they're doing, it's not called sloppy anymore.
It's called control.
What exercises do you think are the best in developing your skill?
I think one of the best ones that I got was life drawings.
So, when you're doing life drawings, like, is there anything specific that you feel like
people should practice while they're drawing from life?
Structure, like, how to build a figure, to make the figure look like two-dimensional.
Sometimes, people don't know that they can use solids to create…to build a figure.
Like drawing Transformers for me is, like, natural because I use a lot cubes, a lot of...
Yeah, it is blocks.
A lot blocks, so, it's really helpful.
So, it's really like to transition from Transformers to a human figure.
Best drawing exercise to improve your drawing skills.
Gesture drawing!
Gesture drawing.
Gesture drawing, yes.
It's, like, the best thing ever.
I'm always, like, sweating when I do gesture, just there's like 30-seconds, I hate 'em because
you can't really get a good drawing unless you're absolutely brilliant at it.
But it's such a good workout for the brain, like, the muscle of art.
So, you do mostly 30-second ones or do you do...?
No, no. It starts with 30 [second], 1 [minute], 3, 5, 15.
Do you use any specific materials for your gesture drawings or whatever...?
Whatever is available.
I try to switch 'em up sometimes if I'm too...like, if I'm too used to let's say, pencil, I'll
just grab my watercolors.
I'll be like, "Okay, what do I now?
Like, how I make it happen?"
So, it's very quick to, like, not overthink because you don't have time.
It's super, super helpful to free your mind.
Best drawing exercise or exercises to improve your drawing skills.
I mean, perspective is something that people should hit constantly.
Just drawing boxes, right?
Can you just draw boxes in space well?
You know, obviously, understanding the rules of perspective: one-point, two-point, three-points,
the cone of vision, all that stuff should be there.
But being able to also move freely with it through quick, you know, free-hand drawing
without having any construction but just turning the box in space, really quite important.
Anything that we draw has planal forms, front planes, top planes, side planes.
And the box is that structure that you need to be able to then apply that to any sort
of observation drawing or design work that you want, want to go for.
That's amazing how many instructors say that as the...
The box.
It truly is the most important thing.
Yeah.
What are some good exercises that, you know, to improve your drawing skill?
You know, drawing from life is obviously a big one that you're gonna hear everywhere.
To me, I think it's lots about the exercise.
You know, if you're getting good information and doing good exercises, that helps but I
think being aware of what you're doing and why is a big one.
I think a lot of people, they have a sketchbook and they do life drawing classes.
You really gotta be thinking about what you're doing and why you're doing it, and are you
improving at it.
You know, if you're training to be a runner, you gotta, you know, you gotta be a specific
runner, You can't just jog.
If you wanna do a marathon, there's types of training to do marathons.
There's types of training to do sprints and, you know, your sprint times or whatever should
be getting better.
If you're finding yourself spinning your tires, I think you just need to step back, and what
is it you're actually trying to learn?
What skillset are you actually trying to work on instead of just drawing?
Does that make sense?
Yeah.
So, I guess it depends on what you're trying to do.
Well, have a specific goal and every couple of months evaluate that goal.
You know, are you getting better at structure?
Are you getting better at proportion?
Are you getting better at lost edges?
Whatever it is you're working on, are you actually getting better at it and focus on
a few things at a time, and let that guide your drawing practice instead of just the
overall practice of drawing.
I do gesture drawing every day.
You do it from life or...?
I do it from photos.
Well, I mean, yeah, every day.
Right.
You can't hire a model every day.
Exactly, but what I can, I mean, the good thing about living in LA is they have, like,
tons of life drawing events in Los Angeles and I'm assuming in the other big cities as well.
There's definitely at least one thing going on every week in LA where you can do life drawing.
I think that one of the best drawing exercises is drawing cubes and boxes out of your imagination
in space without perspective lines, because it forces you to correct them and it forces
you to kind of fix right away, "Okay, that's a little bit off.
Let me fix that angle there, let me fix that angle there."
I think once you're able to see a box in space correctly without having to rely on guides
and vanishing points, it just opens up your world to whatever it is you wanna draw.
That's funny.
I'm doing a basic course and I have intuitive perspective lesson, and I was thinking about
your sketches
Say it again.
All right. Hello!
What do you think are the best drawing exercises?
Thumbnails.
Like, sketching everyday man.
Like...
Like quick sketches.
Quick ones. Yeah, the quick ones.
Because sometimes you get more life into it, like the small ones.
And then you just go scan it and blow it up.
Did you do mostly from reference or did you do a lot of imagination?
A lot of my imagination.
Comics is fantasy.
It's not real life.
So, you can come up with stuff that is not real but still look cool.
Yeah.
Yeah, I wanna use the ink on Spawn, was all this. All me.
Oh, man.
That's cool.
Wait, this in an original, right?
It is. Yeah.
Best drawing exercise for improving your skill.
Especially now, this day and age, I think kids need to be able to draw pencil to paper
first and foremost.
And I know a lot of kids, they learn digital first.
There's something lively and more natural about drawing with your hands.
It's always important to learn how to draw properly pencil and paper before you can apply
all those digital tricks to it afterwards.
It's like you can't undo a piece of paper.
Yeah. Going a step further, actually.
I was just talking up here to Peter Han, and he was talking about forcing his students
to always be drawing with pen so they can't even undo...
Yeah, and that's smart.
Use a ballpoint rolling pen like a Bic.
It has a pressure sensitivity.
Yeah, there's tons of...there's really great artists digitally like when you look at them online.
And as you go through their stuff, they're all, "This stuff is amazing."
And then, you realize they don't have one drawing on pencil to paper.
So, you go like, it's either they're scared or they're scared of that permanent situation.
Digital is safe because you can always go back and correct something…
So, even if somebody wants to be a digital artist, you recommend they do traditional
because it'll help them in improve faster.
It'll help them improve faster and also give them a natural curve and natural flow to actually
drawing with your hand because your arms, like, flow and stuff.
The gestures are even more fluid and stuff, you know kind of thing versus digital where
you're just like...
So, I definitely recommend it and I think it'll work good.
I have my daughter do it.
She draws traditional and then she'll do stuff digitally too afterwards but I make sure she
draws traditionally.
She knows how to draw traditionally first and foremost.
Hey, guys.
In the comments, let me know which of these exercises you're gonna try out or do you have
suggestions for other good exercises?
Leave a comment.
Help each other out.
And remember, this is video three out of four.
I've got one more asking pros video coming soon.