Interviews and blog

the angle of your drawing surface will have an impact on how you draw

9 Quick Wins to Learn Drawing Faster

There’s no getting around the fact that to get good at drawing, you have to practice your fundamental skills over a few years. But our question for today is, are there any quick little things to make the whole process easier that don’t take too much extra time or too

on the left is an early life drawing by a beginner, and on the right is a life drawing after years of practice

Avoid the 3 major mistakes I made learning to draw

https://youtu.be/9vi83s-ihe4 I made every mistake possible when learning to draw. I ran into every pitfall. I would make thehands too small,  Iwould straighten out the pose, I’d make the head too big, I’d put theeyes too high on the head – and I’ve made other videos which cover a lotof

Let’s Make Pelvis Anatomy 10x Easier

Today, we are going to look at the pelvis, this massive structure inside the figure. It’s hugely important for the gesture, it’s hugely important for the anatomy and for the forms. But it’s also horribly complicated. It is a bit of a nightmare shape: Now, I have a little confession for

The 11 Steps to Great Gesture Drawing

I think there are 11 steps to getting really good gesture skills. Let’s say you do 10 out of 11 steps, that’s pretty good! That’s about 90% or so. When you’re 90% of the way there with something you can normally really see that you’re getting close. However, in figure

How to Draw Shoulders in Three Easy Steps

  The problem: complicated anatomy Have you ever been drawing the figure from a side or front view and become quite confused about what you’re seeing in the upper shoulder and upper back? You might find a variety of unfamiliar bumps and indents which don’t make much sense. This article

The MOST useful anatomy idea is also super simple

https://youtu.be/jH0Vkkc3Mgw So, here we have our two artists, Harry and Sally. They both want to learn to draw figures and they spend some time doing a bit of anatomy studying rib cages. Then later, they spend 10 minutes drawing some figures.   Sally comes up with the drawing below on

4 Easy Steps To Finally Conquer Foreshortening

It’s so easy to make the figure feel flat like it’s not three-dimensional. Why is that? Because the drawing surface is flat! The drawing is two-dimensional and so every time we’re trying to create a drawing that has depth to it, that has a third dimension, it’s always a magic

How to Draw Arms – Beginner to Pro

How you draw arms depends on your experience level. So let’s look at the process of drawing arms across 5 levels of experience. This is also an interesting example of how to tackle any area of the figure based on where you are in your learning journey. Total Novice If

How to learn anatomy – 5 DOs and DON’Ts

  DO #1: Do understand the role that anatomy is going to play in your figure drawings It’s not just a case of learning where muscles start and end, and then suddenly your figure drawings will all look amazing. Anatomy is part of a bigger machine of skills. There’s gesture, there’s

Rewire your brain to master art – Four Steps

  Something that never ceases to amaze me about learning art skills is how long it takes between understanding the idea and the principle and being really good at that thing. Probably one of the top three most important skills in art is lerning ) simplifying your values into a

advice for shading figure drawings

Popular but bad SHADING advice

  “Ok so here’s how you shade, you get the blending stump and you carefully smoosh the tones around and add fine gradations and nuance, and boom! You have shaded your figure to perfection!” I downloaded the TikTok app and did everything i could not to get sucked in to

the ten painful stages of learning to draw

The 10 Stages of Learning Any Art Skill

Even though learning to draw and paint is one of life’s great joys, you’ll notice that most of the stages described below include some form of painful feeling, like you’re doing badly. As you’re learning any art skill, rather than thinking, ‘oh, there’s something wrong with me’, it might be