r/ArtistLounge • u/chronically-iconic • Nov 28 '24
General Question What are some of your favourite creative exercises for sketching?
I'm getting into art again, and there are hundreds of suggestions online, but I want to hear from the community. I'm not too bothered with technique right now - I'm just trying to find my spark again.
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u/ronlemen Nov 28 '24
-Blind contour drawing- look at objects and not at your surface and draw what you see.
-Memory drawing-go find something you want to draw, examine it. Pick it up, walk around it, touch it, get your mind to understand it by feel, by sight, by integration, then go somewhere that you cannot see it or reference it and draw what you "feel" and you remember.
-Mark making-grab any tool you have and push it, pull it, scrape it, scribble it, scramble it against the page. Take the same tool and paper, and put something under the paper like a place mat that has texture to it and do a page rub to get strange marks and textures, then try to figure out how to make the same marks with the tool without the place mat or whatever else you might have rubbed over.
-draw what you feel-draw an emotion or a scent, draw a feeling, and do not question your outcome, just try to draw the intangible, it will lead to some abstract discoveries you never knew you had in you, and that you didn't think you would ever try to represent.
-draw a sequence of something that inspired you- basically, a comic strip. Forget the style, just represent actions and see what you come up with.
-draw a how to guide-make some hot apple cider today since it is a holiday here in the states, if you are here in the states...then go draw up a step guide on how you made it. Use hands in it to show them cutting, dicing, pouring, etc.
-color reaction-use color of some kind and communicate how you feel through the colors. Include some of above and allow abstract mark making to settle in. Be inventive on how much of one color over the other, but mostly enjoy the act of creation.
-compositions-draw a bunch of rectangles on a page. fill in each with a composition of shapes and values. DO not get caught up in realism, it is mostly to train your eye and your mind to organize the picture matrix which is what you will be doing if you want to actually make art for yourself or commercial purposes. Everything is communicated through the space you allocated, i.e. the canvas or drawing surface, and it needs to be organized. The organization is like a sentence, it needs good structure to be read by others. The more abstract the better. Abstract spaces can be substituted for actual tangible objects eventually. All great art is a great abstract image. Practice this often. IN fact, make this an exercise you wake up and do in the mornings to kick off your imagination and inspire you to continue making more art.
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u/LispenardJude Traditional, mixed media and writer Nov 28 '24
I simply love gesture drawing, but I know it’s not a very creative thing haha, so my second favorite would be creating fake posters for movies I’ve watched and liked; sometimes I just recreate existing ones, sometimes I do something entirely new based on my experience with the movie
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u/teamboomerang Nov 28 '24
I enjoy doing blind contour drawings and then coloring them or painting them when I don't know what I want to do beyond make something.
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u/chronically-iconic Nov 28 '24
I really enjoy exercises like this - minimal brain power! Thanks
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u/idkmoiname Nov 28 '24 edited Nov 28 '24
Sketching under time stress with a vague goal someone else gave me.
Like in class (not in art) today we had 30mins to draw "something creative (no wrong or right way, just do) , reflecting your" inner resources in life" and give it a short story/explanation.
Absolutely not my comfort zone. I usually draw without any time limitations, and i struggle a lot with spontaneous creativity. My creativity is usually more like really good weed, it needs time to ripe and cure properly. And i need references to study so i can understand the underlaying patterns before i can start to draw something.
Running out of time (and as usual needing way too long to get my proportions correct) i drew faster and rougher than ever before, improvised a paper stump out of a postit to have something to put the graphite in form (at least they somehow had a 6B pencil lol), and well, it worked out so much better in the end than i could have imagined to get it looking in a few minutes. Teached me a lot today about my hidden spontaneous creativity i obviously just need to let it out and do it's thing 🤷
Anyway, as i said, try to go out of your comfort zone when you want to get better at something. Challenge yourself with drawings way out of what you think you can achieve. But don't overdo, if it isn't working out, step back, analyze what you're missing, and give yourself back some confidence with an achievable project in between leaving your comfort zone.
Edit: But understand that the process is about learning something, your goal is not to succeed perfectly in drawing out of your comfort zone. Your goal is to learn while drawing what specific skills (or even tools sometimes) you're missing to be able to succeed one day. In this sense, if you're in the right spirit, you will love to fail since a failure teaches you more than just seeing that you can draw better than you thought.