You may have heard that it’s good to start drawing less with just wrist and fingers and move with your whole arm. There is nothing inherently wrong with drawing this way, but being able to use your whole arm opens up a lot more range of motion and different types of lines, including bigger, smoother lines. Let’s look at how to actually do that, what can go wrong and how to get over those challenges.
A small drawing surface is going to push you towards wrist and fingers. So here’s an easy minimum to aim for:
if you are drawing on A4, try to fill its height with the pose rather than drawing in a small area of it.
If A3, you can get away with poses filling the width especially for short poses, but it’s also good to sometimes go larger and fill the whole page. Going larger depends on your materials and your time for the pose.
Drawing flat on a table can hinder the marks you want to make. It encourages you to hunch over the paper to get a good angle on it,
and if you’re not hunching over it, you may be skewing your view of it.
So a board or sketchbook leaning against a table or chair, an easel, or a sketchbook on a raised knee could work too.
Guys if you don’t normally draw like this, it’s going to be awkward and uncomfortable at first, a bit like writing with the wrong hand. You might even think that those guys at Love Life Drawing don’t know what they’re talking about.
Every new skill in drawing starts with the hump. It’s a struggle, it makes no sense. In fact, it makes things worse than they were before.
If you can get through that part of the learning, you’ll come down the other side of the hump with a new world opening up to you.
So during today’s practice, try to start engaging more of your arm, get those big smooth lines flowing. See you tomorrow!
