Drawing Exercises

Something I can always remember from back in school and first starting college was the drawing exercises we had to do. They always seemed pretty pointless at the time, but afterwards I always realised the benefits from them, like making you see things differently and what not. I suppose when you have to draw 24/7, exercises like these could really come in handy. The ones I can remember are things like 'don't take your pen off the paper' and 'use the wrong hand', so I had a look at what others I could find.

First I downloaded an eBook from http://www.artistdaily.com/Drawing-Basics-Learn-To-Draw/ which has 26 basic drawing exercises to practice.

The thing itself is a bit of a con because it doesn't give you all the 26 it claims to, although from reading what is available in this I have downloaded, although I do believe it would be extremely useful to a fine artist who is wanting to draw more still life like objects and people. I am looking for more basic standard exercises available. Some of the pages in this eBook are like:

Vase/Faces Drawing

I found a website claiming a benefit of learning to draw is to 'get to know your own brain' and seeing how the left and right sides of the brain can conflict. http://www.drawright.com/vaceface.htm

The website reads, "This is a famous optical illusion drawing, called "Vase/Faces" because it can be seen as either two facing profiles or as a symmetrical vase in the center". The instructions on it are to print out one side to the drawing and trace it out, then the exercise is to draw the other side to it exact for it to then turn into the illusion.

Another website with the same exercise on it goes into more detail about what this exercise actually does with your brain as you are doing it - http://www.learn-to-draw-right.com/right-brain-left-brain.html. The section is called 'What just happened?':

"The instruction to name the different parts of the face meant that you were being forced into really using your left brain.

You were then asked to complete the other half of the drawing symmetrically. However, this can only be done by plugging into the right hand visual, spatial side of the brain. This is the part of the brain that, without you even knowing it, is assessing relationships of sizes, curves,  angles and shapes.

We deliberately created a set of conditions that create a left brain vs. right brain struggle so you would feel it. The difficulty of making that shift causes a feeling of conflict and confusion - sometimes felt as a momentary paralysis.

When you found a way to overcome this and complete the drawing symmetrically you were then using your right brain or R-Mode."

Drawing Warm Up's

Whilst searching for exercises I came across this website (http://waynet.hubpages.com/hub/Drawing-Warm-Up-Exercises) claiming that doing drawing warm up exercises 15 minutes a day can warm your hand up and get it in the mood for drawing. 

"Making a time before you start to draw is essential for these warm up exercises to benefit your drawing activities and this is some of the drawing basics you should be thinking of, I do 15 minutes each morning to get my hand into the mood of drawing anything, my hand is like the olympic drawing hand, it needs to practice before it runs on the page."

I do think the person who had wrote this website has a point: often when I sit down to draw I hesitate a little at first before I can get properly into it, and after the first 10-15 minutes of awkwardly drawing thinking nothing looks right I end up getting more into what I am doing, therefore enjoying doing it a lot more. 

"Drawing warm up exercises come in useful to get your drawing hand ready and they are easy to do each day in your daily routine and all they involve are little scribbles and spirals like in the pictures below."

They have included a couple of images of what they do for their drawing warm ups, to show what sort of stuff they mean:

They have made a point of saying on the website, "If you keep up on your drawing warm ups, then your will be creating works of art all day long". I have decided that for the next two weeks, each morning when I wake up before I do anything or get on with my day, I will spend 15 minutes doing these drawing warm ups to see if they make any difference to what I do with the rest of my day.

All of the drawing exercises I complete will be on a separate post which can be found here: Drawing Warm Up Exercises. More details about this can be found on that post.