Choose a topic

LEARNING PROCESS

How To Structure Your Learning And Mindset

GESTURE

Give Your Figure Life And Movement

PERSPECTIVE

A Few Basics Go A Long Way

VALUES & SHADING

Learn About Light & Shadow

PROPORTIONS

Observing Distances And Angles

FORMS

Not As Hard As It First Seems

ANATOMY

Just The Essentials Of This Big Topic

PAINTING + COLOUR

Principles That Change How You See

MISC

Materials, weight and balance and other topics

Not sure where to start?

OR BROWSE ALL TUTORIALS IN DATE ORDER

LEARNING PROCESS

Learning to draw and paint is a journey with plenty of challenges. You are much more likely to succeed if you have a plan for what skills you’ll learn, how you’ll learn them and you have the right learning mindset going into it. You’ll need to give yourself time and allow yourself to make a lot of drawings that don’t work!

START WITH A QUICK OVERVIEW

Learn Everything About Drawing in 10 Minutes ▶︎

Here you’ll see the big picture – all the major drawing skills outlined concisely. These take a while to learn, but it’s doable and we are here to help!

UNDERSTAND FIGURE DRAWING SKILLS

The First 7 Skills You Need to Learn ▶︎

Within figure drawing, there are specific skills to learn. Here are the first 7 of those.

MAKE A PLAN

How to Improve Massively Across 12 Months ▶︎

Creating art can be spontaneous! But learning art skills often benefits from having a solid plan.

GESTURE

Gesture is what breathes life and movement into your drawings. At first it can feel confusing, but with time, it can become one of the most enjoyable aspects of figure drawing.

START WITH A BASIC OVERVIEW

Beginner Gesture Drawing ▶︎

In this simple article, we learn what gesture is.

THE FIRST SKILL TO LEARN

This basic skill fixes 90% of gesture struggles ▶︎

Gesture is often described as a mysterious thing you feel. However, a huge part of it is really clear and easy to define.

AND THEN WORK ON THIS SKILL…

The Secret of Gestural Flowing Curves ▶︎

How to make those lovely flowing gestural marks that we love in gesture drawings.

AND THEN COMPLETE THE PROCESS…

The 11 Steps to Great Gesture Drawing ▶︎

This article outlines the full process of learning high level gesture drawing skills.

PERSPECTIVE

These skills will help us create a 3 dimensional world on our 2D drawing surface. Perspective can get complex and technical, but fortunately we only need the basics for most of our artwork.

START WITH THE BASICS

1, 2 AND 3 POINT PERSPECTIVE MADE SIMPLE ▶︎

The first thing to learn about perspective is how parallel lines converge towards vanishing points as they go away from us. Here is a super clear guide to that.

THEN LEARN ABOUT THIS

EYE LEVEL AND HORIZON LINE EXPLAINED ▶︎

The horizon line is often poorly explained which is a shame because it’s such an important part of perspective. Fortunately, we have it covered with this article.

AND ONCE YOU’RE READY, TRY THIS…

DRAWING THINGS WITH BOXES (link to YouTube)

At this stage it’s useful to start drawing simple objects with box shapes using your new understanding of basic perspective. This will be a great way to start applying the theory in practice.

VALUES & SHADING

Value means how light or dark something is. An object has its own value because of its colour. The value we see is then affected by how much light is hitting the object. So the value of each part of each thing we see comes from a combination of the local colour and the light.

START WITH THE BASICS

Rewire your brain for art in 4 steps ▶︎

It’s so useful to start grouping values together. In other words, see everything that is relatively dark as a distinct group and everything that is relatively light as a distinct group. Learn how to do this with this article.

THEN CHECK THIS OUT

THE ULTIMATE GUIDE TO SHADING (link to YouTube)

This article will guide you through the types of shadow we see and also how to shade figures using that knowhow.

TO DIVE DEEPER, TRY THIS

SEEING LIGHT AND SHADOWS IN DAILY LIFE ▶︎

This article will go into more detail about the shadows we see and why they are the way they are. Understanding these ideas will help you see

And now for the really fun part

SHAPE DESIGN ▶︎
EDGE DESIGN ▶︎

Now we can use our understanding of value get into some fun elements, such as shape design and edge design.

DRAW WHAT YOU SEE:
PROPORTIONS AND MORE​

Drawing what you see is actually quite hard! The reason is that our brain love to distort our observations because it has preconceived ideas about what everything looks like. We have a ‘symbol’ in our heads for what a hand looks like, what a face looks like and so on. Even experienced artists struggle with this. So with the skills outlined in these articles you can draw what you are seeing.

START WITH AN OVERVIEW

PROPORTIONS OVERVIEW ▶︎

This article shows you how to combine the basic principles of proportions in your drawings.

GET INTO ABSTRACT SHAPES!

2 BEGINNERS RAPIDLY IMPROVE ▶︎

This article will introduce two case-studies of students who use a simple tecnique to rapidly improve.

AVOID COMMON MISTAKES

TOP 5 PROPORTION MISTAKES (LINK TO YOUTUBE)

Almost all students make similar mistakes with proportions. See the top 5 in this video.

FORMS

Drawing and painting from life always requires us to create an illusion – the illusion of depth. Our paper is 2D and the thing we are drawing needs to feel 3D. How do we give our drawings that sense of 3D form? These skills, which can be combined with the perspective ideas above, will help.

START WITH AN OVERVIEW

THE 3 STEPS TO GIVE YOUR DRAWINGS FORM AND DEPTH ▶︎

This article will help you understand the ways that we can create depth and form in a drawing.

THEN CHECK THIS OUT

CROSS CONTOUR LINES – THE LASER BEAM APPROACH (link to YouTube)

This article is all about the lines that wrap around the forms of the figure. It’s essentially about imagining lines that are drawn onto the surface of the figure. This article will help you figure out how to see and draw these well.

ANATOMY

Knowing about the figure’s structure can help you see with more clarity. However, studying really advanced anatomy when you are just starting out is going to be overwhelming instead of helping. Our approach to anatomy is to simplify it and focus on the things you need at each stage.

START WITH AN OVERVIEW

HOW TO LEARN ANATOMY: DOS AND DON’TS
This article will take you through the process of learning anatomy. The key is to not bite off more than you can chew! At each stage of learning, there are specific things to learn – you don’t have to learn it all at once!

SEE THE FIGURE WITH FRESH EYES

THE FRESH EYES APPROACH

This article will introduce you to our Fresh Eyes challenge. It’s really a mini-course that helps you see the basic structure and forms of the figure across 10 days. This is the first tutorial, check it out.

THEN GET INTO DEEPER INTO DIFFERENT AREAS OF THE FIGURE

Once you are familiar with the major forms of the figure, you can start to dive deeper into the specidics of different areas using the articles below.  

LIST OF ARTICLES

Ribcage

Pelvis

Arms

Hands
Shoulders
Chest
Neck
Abs

Armpits (an important junction point for various muscles)

Fat

WEIGHT & BALANCE

Balance is an often overlooked topic in figure drawing. In this article, you’ll see how balance is central to the gesture of the pose. If you’re an intermediate level artist, adding skill with balance will get you to that next level.

 

 

7 TOOLS TO GIVE WEIGHT TO YOUR FIGURES ▶︎

One way to make a 2D drawing feel more 3D and tangible is to consider the weight of the figure. This article breaks down a few simple approaches to give weight to your figures.

MATERIALS

There are a huge variety of materials you can use for figure drawing and painting. This article goes over many of the options in front of you with their pros and cons.

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