This is the start of a series of lessons designed to help you build a solid foundation of life drawing skills, with the end goal being expressive drawings in your own style. We’ll go through a straightforward and doable drawing process and a set of exercises designed to help you develop the skills in those […]
After this lesson… you’ll be able to explain how to use structured practice for your eyes, arm and mind It’s probably best to watch the video, but if you prefer, we’ve written it out below. (If you like the video, please hit the like and subscribe button on YouTube – it’s a new video series […]
If you’re watching this video, hopefully you’ve gone through our video series, which has been building up to this. Well done for working on your skills and for putting more effort than most would into your learning. We have worked on a lot of skills and steps – isolating them with focused exercises. Now it’s […]
In the last lesson we talked about fleshing out our figure with simplified outlines and tonal shapes. If you’ve not seen that lesson, check that out before this. This post explains a series of exercises to help you practise the things we learned in the last lesson. These exercises will… help you to start capturing figures […]
So far, we have laid down our foundation with the construction, and even started correcting some of the proportions and angles. We are now going to take an exciting step – we are going to flesh out the figure on top of that foundation. It’s best to watch the video so you can see the […]
It’s best to watch the video so you can see the demonstrations, but if you prefer we have also written out the lesson below. In previous lessons, we have gone over how to start to construct figures for poses viewed from the front. Our process is similar for poses viewed directly from the side and […]
Edit: there should now be an audio player at the top of this page, where you can hear the article. Why is it important to draw with your whole arm? Drawing with your arm rather than just wrist and hand can be a great way to achieve clean and flowing lines – the types of lines that […]
Life drawing, also known as figure drawing, is the act of drawing a living person. Normally this means drawing a nude model in real life – i.e. not from a photograph or from memory or imagination. You may wonder why the model is usually nude, and perhaps the easiest answer there is that clothes aren’t […]
Having made the Draw Life Beautifully online course, we are now old hands at making videos. This was the first video we ever made, but we think it still has some good information. It’s all about drawing technique and how to build up a drawing. To build a solid foundation of life drawing skills, have […]
In part 1 we discussed why portrait art is so difficult, and that one way to simplify things is to think in simple geometric shapes and keep in mind some basic principles. Disengage the facial recognition software Thinking in simple geometric shapes can help the brain to stop thinking of what you are seeing as […]