Today we’re going to go through a powerful exercise designed to build your gesture skills, test your knowledge of the figure, build your brain’s visual memory and your ability to draw from imagination. So it’s useful for a lot of things. There’s a video version and an article version below that: We’ve teamed up with Simon […]
The ability to simplify what you see is, in my opinion, the number one skill that separates an experienced artist and a beginner artist. Even artists that create detailed and nuanced drawings and paintings use that simplification skill to build the foundations of their work. Today we are going to learn 5 steps for simplifying […]
In our article, the 5 stages of learning to draw people, we talked about how everyone starts at the symbols stage, where your drawings get distorted by preconceptions about how people look. The next stage was the analytical stage, where you learn to observe and draw what you see. With the help of my wonderful […]
We are going to learn how to draw the area on the front of the torso between the ribcage and pelvis. There’s the abdominal muscles, fibrous structures and fat and other components, but also there’s the gesture connecting the ribcage and pelvis to think about. We’ll look at how to draw all of this – […]
If you struggle with proportions for your figures, this video’s going to be useful for you. If you’d prefer to read it as an article, it is written out below the video. We’ve described before some techniques for getting things in the right place when you doing life drawing – alignment and negative space and […]
We are going to look at how to draw chests. Our aim is to keep it super simple and practical, so that it’s doable and really helps your drawing. You tell us if we succeeded! This isn’t an anatomy video really, but there are some bits of anatomy in it wherever it’s going to be […]
It looks easy and turns out beautiful in the tutorial by the expert, but what is it like to actually do this method when you’re still learning? We asked subscribers to our newsletter to volunteer and test the method out, and the results were varied and fascinating. (You can watch the video or read the […]
I’m really excited about this hair drawing tutorial! The method Frank shows us is really simple but incredibly effective. Here’s why this is a must-watch: 1. Hair is overlooked, but when done well hugely powerful for both portraits and figure drawings. Hair is a defining feature of many people. 2. Frank Gambino such an expert […]
We are going to learn about a straightforward way to make your drawing feel 3-dimensional, specifically we’re learning from Antoine Watteau and the three chalk or ‘trois crayon’ approach. We’ll see why it’s quite a simple approach to start using, and if you’re a beginner it can teach you a lot. But this video / […]
If you struggle to draw shoulders, this video/article is for you. We are going to look at the landmark lines and shapes to look for to help make sense of this tricky area, and we’re going to try to keep it as simple and doable as possible. How do you think of shoulders? Maybe you […]