Virtual Art Academy® Drawing Lessons

There are a lot of different techniques for learning drawing – gesture, contour, envelopes, scribble line, mass, and so on. But with all these techniques to choose from, where do you start to learn how to draw? how do you decide which technique to choose? In these drawing course units you will learn all the individual techniques, then I explain how to put it all together to take away the confusion and help you learn how to draw better.

To improve your drawing skills you should always be sketching. I recommend you keep a sketchbook with you as much as possible and draw whenever you get the chance. It does not really matter what you draw, any subject will give you valuable practice. There are several techniques for quickly capturing something in front of you. These are generally called gesture sketches. It is important you choose the right approach. The key factor in choosing the right approach is how much time do you have?

Most students have trouble getting their drawings to look real. This is simply because some of the proportions are not accurate. Luckily there are several techniques you can use to check and fix the accuracy of your drawings. You can use techniques such as levels and plumb lines to check for errors in alignment, and there are many other techniques you can use that I talk about in this course unit. If you do not get your drawing accurate, no amount of color or detail will make the painting look good.

Did you know that problems in drawing are caused by knowing too much rather than knowing too little? The big secret to drawing well is to return your brain to the state it was in when you were a child and before your brain started to symbolize what it sees and ignore the actual shapes that are in front of it. A face instead of being a skull shape with various small forms superimposed on it becomes symbolized as a circle with two smaller circles for eyes, a triangle for a nose and a curved line for the mouth.

In previous units I cover all the individual techniques you need to know to draw well. In this course unit you will learn how to put together all these separate techniques in order to create an accurate drawing. This integration of techniques is the most difficult part, and is rarely talked about in books on drawing. In this unit I will explain actually what goes on inside the mind of an expert artist when he or she is actually drawing. This is something that many artists find difficult, if not impossible, to explain to you, but you need to know about if you want to draw like they do.

If you want to paint landscapes, and in particular townscapes or anything with buildings in it, you need to have a basic knowledge of perspective. Some books make this topic too complicated so I've tried to keep it simple and focus on the main techniques you need to know about to make your buildings look right. In fact there is one technique I describe here which will give you 99% of the benefits of perspective without even knowing a thing about perspective rules. This can really make your life simple!

Not every painting can be solved by the use of basic perspective rules. For example, if you are painting in a hill town in Tuscany with sloping streets, you soon learn that you need to understand a bit more about perspective! (That's when I first realized I didn't understand as much of the science of perspective as I thought I did!). And if you like to draw or paint interesting buildings that have arches, then again you'll need more than just the basic rules of perspective.