If you are able to draw the shapes without construction you can always do that.
3 Tried-and-True Drawing Lessons for Beginners
For over 20 years, artist Claire Watson Garcia has been teaching people how to draw at the Silvermine School of Art in New Canaan, Connecticut. Below, we share excerpts from her latest book, Drawing for the Absolute and Utter Beginner, Revised, including three exercises to jumpstart your drawing skills. For these lessons, you’ll need a drawing pad, a spool of wire, scissors, scrap paper, a pencil, and a pen.
In a world in which we are surrounded by electronic media—facilitating as well as complicating our communications—drawing remains a unique, compelling activity. With assistance from simple drawing tools, our hands can express what we feel, think, and are fascinated by in a direct and meaningful manner. Drawing produces joy. It provides us with a way to depict and share a treasure trove of emotions and experiences that might otherwise remain hidden.
Exercise #1: Wire drawing
Wire drawing by student Anna Ballantyne from Drawing for the Absolute and Utter Beginner, Revised © 2018 by Claire Watson Garcia. Published by Watson-Guptill, an imprint of Crown Publishing Group.
Let’s get started by getting comfortable drawing lines on paper. Your goal will be to observe the wire shape you make carefully, and then slowly record what you see.
Read these directions through before you begin to draw. After that, don’t read and draw at the same time; refer to the following summary to remind yourself of the exercise sequence:
Use pencil for drawing #1.
1. Place your open pad of paper in front of you. Remove a piece of drawing paper and put it on the table next to your pad (to the left for righties, to the right for lefties).
2. With scissors, cut a 15-inch piece of wire, and bend it into a shape that appeals to you, leaving the ends loose. Don’t create a recognizable shape, like a flower. If you’ve made a shape that sticks way up, flatten it a little.
3. Put your wire on the loose piece of scrap paper next to your pad to see the wire more clearly. Move the wire around until you find a view that you like. You’re going to draw on the pad. Tilt the pad if it feels more comfortable that way.
4. Look at your wire. You don’t have to memorize the shape; just begin the process of observation, taking in the wire’s bends and bumps from one end to the other.
5. Hold your pencil as you would when writing. Put your pencil point on the paper at a spot that will correspond to one end of your wire. Once your pencil point touches the paper, don’t lift it until you’ve recorded the entire wire, from end to end.
6. Slowly, very slowly, begin to record what you see—every change, every bend in the wire—with one dark, continuous line. If you’re a speed demon who charges through intersections, you’ll have a challenge here. The slower you go, the more you’ll benefit.
7. Look back and forth between your pencil line and the wire as you work, keeping your pencil point on the paper at all times, without lifting it. Proceed v-e-r-r-r-y slowly. You are not going to erase, so make your marks show. Press down and watch a nice dark line emerge from your pencil point. Record the wire until you reach the end.
8. Do at least two more drawings, on one sheet, if there’s room—using your black pen this time. Remember to change the wire shape each time. Maintain a slow pace. Eraser is forbidden—so be bold!
Beginner Art Lesson: Shapes
We will start our drawing journey by following these stages of practice, this is what we go through in the worksheets above.
Stage 1. Shapes
Here we draw some fun shapes and practice the feeling of making marks on the page. We want to develop the habit of drawing with confidence and we can do that by first taking the time just draw some shapes.
Do this without any pressure and just have fun, approach this with curiosity and playfulness
Stage 2. Faces
Now to make this extra fun lets add some cute and goofy faces to some shapes. Start with the shape first and then add the face by drawing two dots and a curved line.
Let’s take our fun little faces a step further by adding some noses. Feel free to use triangles and circles to draw these noses. You can also play around with different expressions if you are feeling extra ambitious.
