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How to Draw Without Taking Classes
This article was co-authored by Kelly Medford. Kelly Medford is an American painter based in Rome, Italy. She studied classical painting, drawing and printmaking both in the U.S. and in Italy. She works primarily en plein air on the streets of Rome, and also travels for private international collectors on commission. She founded Sketching Rome Tours in 2012 where she teaches sketchbook journaling to visitors of Rome. Kelly is a graduate of the Florence Academy of Art.
There are 7 references cited in this article, which can be found at the bottom of the page.
wikiHow marks an article as reader-approved once it receives enough positive feedback. In this case, 85% of readers who voted found the article helpful, earning it our reader-approved status.
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Drawing is an enjoyable artistic skill to learn and makes for a great hobby. When you are first starting, the quality of your drawings can feel like a major hurdle. You may think that you need professional lessons to make something good, but this isn’t true. By simply drawing for fun, you can save money and improve your skills. To draw without classes, sketch in short lines, shade in shadows, draw figures out of shapes, and practice as much as possible.
Steps
Part 1
Part 1 of 3:
Beginning to Sketch
- When starting out, you don’t need specialty art supplies. Any pen, pencil, or paper on hand will do.
- The shorter you make your line strokes, the steadier your drawing will appear.
- Don’t critique your work. Move fast and hone your stroke.
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Fill in details. Once you have a basic outline of your subject, start drawing the interior. Search for landmarks on the subject, distinguishing marks such as a dent in a cup or a tuft of hair on a dog that will give you an idea of where to place nearby lines. [2] X Research source
- This can be practiced by doing a shading bar. Start at one end of the paper. Move your pencil back and forth as you move across the paper. Apply more pressure to transition to darker marks.
- Value bars are also good practice. Divide a rectangle into five sections. Leave one end white. Darken the other end as much as you can. Layer your lines in the squares in between to make different shades of gray.
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Part 2
Part 2 of 3:
Drawing Subjects from Shapes
Practice drawing shapes. Copying lines can only get you so far. If you can master shapes, you can begin to draw from imagination and improve the sense of perspective in all your drawings. Start by trying to draw 3D shapes. Adding a rough line across a circle, for example, gives you spheres seen from different perspectives depending on where you place the line. [4] X Research source
- Spend time observing subjects, figuring out how you can fit them into your forms.
- Refer back to these sketches to improve your other drawings.
- Simplifications are okay and can lead to your own style. For example, it would be too time-consuming to memorize every muscle in a body.
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Part 3
Part 3 of 3:
Learning to draw: an active perceptual approach to observational drawing synchronising the eye and hand in time and space
Abstract What happens when we draw? How do we transform the visible into lines, and how does drawing the lines transform our perception? The research explores these questions through analysis of physical behaviour in observational drawing, specifically the communication between eye and hand in time and space. By connecting new scientific models of expert drawing behaviour with enactive perception theory (Noë 2004), observational drawing practice and pedagogy, the thesis concludes that drawing is both an action and a form of perception, finely-tuned for detail by the coupling of the movements of the eye with those of the hand. One draws for perception, not from perception. The contribution of the thesis is the development of an enactive observational drawing method, based on the orchestration of eye and hand. While observational drawing is often viewed as more to do with looking with the eye than moving the body, this novel method teaches students to attend to coordination and timing, and its perceptual role. Students learn to draw by learning the dance of the eye and the hand, by developing rhythm. The thesis positions observational drawing as a dynamic embodied engagement with the world; ‘drawing with life’ or ‘drawing life’, rather than drawing from life. The drawing method is defined as presentation (distinct from representation) recognising that perception is transformed by the action of drawing and entailing that it cannot be re-presented, given that it only exists as it emerges. Perception is understood to happen within the movements of drawing. Drawing is described as a two-way conversation between eye and hand, whereby the eye learns from the hand, and develops a slower ‘hand-like’ way of looking, that enables drawing. The drawing method teaches students to move the eye in a slower more detailed way, scanning an object, to allow a fine-grained presentation. The project explores the use and potential of drawing in this way as a research tool, and develops methods for future study of the articulation of the body for observational drawing, and of the complex relationship between perception and action. The conclusion reached is that drawing requires orchestrated movements of eye and hand, and that due to the reflexive nature of drawing, with the action of the hand elucidating vision and in turn influencing the behaviour of the eye, drawing is itself a perceptual process. One perceives from drawing, rather than draws from perception.
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Related Papers
Thinking through Drawing: Practice into Knowledge 2011, New York, Teachers College, ColumbiaUniversity, Art and Art Education Program.
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Thinking through Drawing: practice into knowledge 2011, Kantrowitz, A., Brew, A. & Fava , M.,eds., New York, 2012, Teachers College, ColumbiaUniversity, Art and Art Education Program.
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The symposium Thinking through Drawing: Practice into Knowledge brought together artists, neuroscientists, cognitive psychologists, medical practitioners, designers, and educators from the US and the UK, all with a shared interest in drawing and cognition. This trans-disciplinary gathering was held at Teachers College, Columbia University in New York City in October 2011 and addressed a broad range of concerns regarding contemporary drawing practice, theoretical analysis and education, in light of current scientific research.
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Drawing accuracy has been extensively studied in children, but very little is known of what would make some adults more accurate in copying objects or scenes than many others. One factor may simply be practice: artists have often spent thousands of hours making drawings. The focus of this thesis has been to explore how this intensive practice has affected visual and memory processes. In a series of studies, we first demonstrated that drawing expertise does not relate to a more veridical perception of the world: professional artists and art students were no better than novices at seeing scenes accurately – at undoing the automatic perceptual mechanisms that ordinarily correct for visual context like shadows and depth (visual constancies). This suggests that intensive training in drawing may not affect already well-established perceptual mechanisms, but might affect higher-order processes such as visual analysis of object structure. In a number of studies, we next investigated how trained draftspersons visually encode and integrate structural information when analyzing an object. First, to test whether artists had a more advanced ability to represent complex shapes, we designed a gaze-contingent moving window task where participants had to classify an object as structurally possible or impossible, while only being able to see a portion of the object centered on the gaze position. Experts were able to perform this task with smaller samples of the object. This result suggests that skill in drawing relates to the ability to integrate local samples from each fixation into a more robust internal representation. We then asked whether drawing accuracy could also be related to the encoding efficiency of structural information from a single fixation (no eye movements allowed), with the test object centered at fixation or located in peripheral vision. In this case, we found that experts could discriminate possible vs impossible objects with shorter presentation durations and this was true whether the object was presented at fixation or in the periphery. Finally, we investigated the role of visual memory during the drawing process and whether more skilled participants have a better representation of feature locations. To do so, we designed an interactive pen tablet experiment coupled with a change detection task where participants had to copy a figure on a pen tablet. Throughout the copying process, changes could occur in both the original figure and the copy and participants had to correct any changes they noticed (the figure and the drawing were visible in alternation). We found that all participants detected changes better when they occurred in the original than in their own drawing. Moreover, experts were better at detecting changes, but only when drawing was involved (contrasted with a simple change detection task without drawing). Taken together these results demonstrate that intensive training in drawing affects higher-order perceptual and visual memory mechanisms but not basic perceptual mechanisms that already well-grounded on the life-long perceptual experiences that we all share.
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