
Drawing For Beginners
April 17, 2020
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April 24, 2020Beginners Drawing Exercises
One of the best ways to learn drawing for beginners is to set up a regular practise of doing beginners drawing exercises.
In the above video I walk you through some simple and easy drawing exercises designed for beginners that we use in the new course “Drawing For Beginners”
In the course we recommend that you plan to do these drawing exercises regularly as part of your art practise. Even ten to fifteen minutes a day of doing some simple drawing exercises will help you improve your drawing skills in a short period of time.
The drawing exercises you want to do when you are a beginner are designed to improve your skills and techniques with using a pencil for drawing. A large part of becoming a good drawer is to develop the dexterity of using the pencil. Getting a feel for it in your hand, understanding how much pressure to use and when, and how to gain a full range of motion while mainting control.
Sounds difficult but its really a lot easier to do than it sounds when you practice a few basic drawing exercises.

One of the exercises we recommend is what we call “Connect The Dots”. This is a great exercise for learning hand to eye co-ordination, and developing a fuller range of motion with the pencil.
The idea is you take a fresh page of your sketchbook and place down a whole lot of random dots on the page. Some close together, some further away. Fill the page up with dots.
Then when you have sufficient dots on the page the exercise is to then connect the dots by drawing a straight line between two dots. Use just one motion to draw the line. It’s a good idea to start off with dots that are close together. Start with small lines and then as your confidence grows work out to dots that are further and further away.
You can see in the above photo an example of this exercise in connecting the dots. In the video above I walk you through this exercise in more details.

Another important exercise to practise regularly which will improve your drawing skills is “Toning”. This is a simple but fundamental technique for good drawing and another exercise we recommend practising daily if you can.
The idea is to apply a tone to the paper in an even and consistent manner. The amount of pressure you use will determine how dark the shade of tone is. You will want to try this exercise with a variety of different pencil weights from 6B through to 4H pencils.
As you practise this exercise what you want to achieve is a consistent application of the tone. Try also working within a defined space. Draw two parallel lines in your sketchbook and then try applying the tone in between the lines. This will also help improve your control over the pencil and your eye to hand co-ordination.
A variation on this exercise is to try applying the tone to the left of the page and then to the right.
Again you will see an example of this toning exercise in the video above.

Another great exercise to try is applying a gradient tone.
In the previous exercise of applying a tone to the paper we were focused on applying a consistent even tone. Now we take it one step further and apply a gradient in the tone. A gradient is where we go from a lighter tone to a darker one.
This can be achieved simply by increasing the amount of pressure you use as you apply the tone. Start off with a light amount of pressure to apply the tone and as you move the pencil (either to the left of the page or the right) start to increase the amount of pressure you use.
The result you are looking for is a consistent even gradient from light to dark. When you have achieved a good result going from light to dark try the reverse by going from dark to light. This means you will start with maximum pressure on the pencil and then decrease the pressure as you go.
Try these exercises out. When you start to do them on a regular basis you will find that your skills and confidence with drawing will improve.
In the new course “Drawing For Beginners” we go through a whole range of exercises like these. Each exercise comes with a PDF template you can download and use.
Enjoy your drawing and have fun doing these exercises.
Register now for the “Drawing For Beginners” course and enjoy a 50% discount of the price. Click the button for the details.