New to life-drawing? Read this first

Drawing is not an innate ability: like all skills it is developed through practice.

A primary concern of many first-timers to figure drawing is their competence in drawing the nude body. Art, just like when learning any other skills forces us to go through various stages of skill progression. Our life drawing classes are a constant reminder of this. Each artist brings with them different skills, strengths and desires, each level suitable for the stage of learning that they are in at that moment. It is important to remember that drawing is a visual language, and rooted in your own observations of the figure, so learning the first lessons for anyone new to our life drawing class, is learning to observe well. If your aim is to draw well, you must first learn how to look. In order to see the model as they are, rather than as you imagine them to be. You will need to strip away your ingrained preconceptions of what the human body should look like, and instead learn to simply see what is in front of you.

When starting your life drawing journey, it is wise to start by repeating simple exercise, keep to a limited range of drawing materials and don’t put too much pressure on yourself to create finished products. Remember that drawing is developed through practice. Learning to draw is a journey of learning and developing skills through exploration and developing new intentions that you could not have anticipated when you first began. This is the dominant feature of all artist work, as no matter how proficient they are, learning never ends.

Hours not years. Your speed of improvement is relative to the hours that you put in, not the months on years since you first started.

Start simple, repeat what works. When you begin life drawing it is important to find exercises that you enjoy and repeat them again and again. Mini-exercises such as blind contour drawing, drawing with the unorthodox hand and extending the reach of the arm, all present clear boundaries, intended to as warm-ups to a session and to break ‘bad habits’.

Learn to enjoy learning. Enjoy the exercise and the processes for the experience rather than the final outcome. It is interesting the vast majority of those new to drawing aim for their approach to be realistic. However, without developing our ability to learn to see the basic underlying shapes that make up even the most complex subjects, it is difficult to develop our ‘eye’ for the small interrelated shapes that make up the human body. It is a good idea when learning to draw to begin practising very basic shapes; a sphere, cone, cylinder and cube. By practising drawing these basic shapes you will begin to recognise that this is the basis of anything you draw from trees, to people. In much the same way you can use linear drawing exercises such as continuous line drawing, or contour drawing to loosen up and train your eye to view visualise these shapes as you draw.

Find a community. Learning to draw alongside other people is critical for support and inspiration. Our life drawing classes start off with some quick drawing poses to give you a quick overview of the model’s body in that pose. Using linear drawing techniques can allow you to really look at the figure and begin to understand the tiny changes in direction of form and contour. Indeed, many artist utilise this method of drawing to thinking across the whole figure to improve understanding of proportion and perception of the figure, so that they are able to see it more objectively. 

In the next blog, I will talk about different linear drawing techniques and how they can help you to progress your drawing skills.

Nichola.