SIX Drawing Tips I’ve Stuck With

Welcome, it’s time to learn some secrets of the arts… secrets that anyone can learn. Are you ready? Wah, anyway! So I’ve been drawing for a few years now. I’ve learned from scratch, practiced loads of different subjects, and while I still think I’m far from an expert, I’m pretty dang happy with how things are going. Like many folks I always itch to get better. I see skilled artists out there and want to know how I can do what they do. And I’m sure they have art they strive for too. And yet, there’s a bit of a science, not just in learning how to make art, but in learning how to learn. Really, hey, that’s what a lot of my channel is about. Yet, there are patterns, and for the past couple months, I’ve been thinking about the learning practices that I am constantly going back to, the tricks of art, and there’s six that really stand out in my mind.

Heya! Name’s Kanjon, and you’re watching a video on one of the many art topics I love to think about. Today’s six tricks are accessible to everyone: they’re easy enough to think about and understand. But they are so easy to forget, especially when you are learning new things and constantly thinking about what you wanna draw next. If you’re a beginner or you’ve never heard of some of these before, you might be surprised; aaand some of you who have been doing art for a while might realize you’ve forgotten one or two. For that reason, I think this is a useful video for anyone anywhere along their art adventure.

Your Shoulder

I do Q&A videos every so often (by the way, the form’s open for the next one; link’s in the description), and a super common question I get is about how to actually make smooth sketches, smooth lines. Sure, there are software stabilizers digitally, but what do you do on paper? I think this is one of the biggest things that stops people from learning to draw, And thinking that they just don’t have the right personality for it, that it is genetic — but it’s not! So many people assume that you draw the way you write, and sure that’s possible but… not ideal. Especially if you’re trying to learn how. Writing and drawing use different parts of your arm, at least… that’s the goal. The key is your shoulder.

I’m actually gonna start by showing you something a little strange. If you’re able to try this yourself, I highly recommend it. I’ve got this marker, nothing special about it, and I’m going to just try to draw some straight lines the way most people would think to. If I really try I can kinda get a few that look okay, but most have a bit of wiggle in them. You might be tempted to try to draw fast with mixed results; the wiggle might get worse or you might overshoot where you wanted to make your mark. A lot of this motion is coming out of my wrist. And that’s exactly what’s wrong.

Now, I’m gonna tape this string to this marker and we’re gonna try something different. I’m sure some art instructor out there has probably done this same demo before, but I’ve personally not seen it yet, and actually got the idea from “rope stabilizers” that are used in digital art software. Exact same concept’s about to happen, buckle up. I’m going to pick this string up and just drag the marker along. Look at that! Big smooth marks. If I stop, I can make some turns and have a hard corner, but if I just want to make some nice curves, all I have to do is drag this along. You can even see the marker itself wiggling around and the line’s still smooth! This the core of the secret: it’s like a see-saw, except the middle, the fulcrum, is all the way down at the tip of the marker, so even if I wiggle this marker around a lot, the tip barely moves. But if I drag it, it moves along just fine.

That’s what we’re doing. Your arm’s going to become the rope. You’re going to pull that rope along using just your shoulder. A way you can warm up to this is to get a big piece of paper, lay your arm down on it while holding your pencil gently, and try to drag your arm across with your shoulder. Try to keep your elbow and wrist locked, only using them to push down with the pencil. You see it? Try this a bunch. Then try doing this without letting your arm flop down onto the paper: let it be pulled by your shoulder, but gently use your elbow and wrist to push down with that pencil. It takes a little bit of time to make this not feel weird, but you can get this into your muscle memory soon enough.

There’s a secret signal to this you might have seen if you’ve watched someone draw in person. They tend to hold their pencil like this, pencil completely underneath their hand. This posture actually forces you to use your shoulder, because if you try to use your wrist, you’ll just keep poking yourself with the end of your pencil. I’ve seen SO MANY art instructors show this overhand grip and tell you that it’s the way you’re supposed to draw, or if you’re lucky and they even mention why, they’ll just say that it helps with making smooth marks. But the real secret is in the shoulder.

Does this mean you never draw using your wrist or elbow? Nah. But focus specifically on your shoulder first, really give it some use, and you’ll find the perfect balance that gives you total control over your lines. With a little practice, this even works with small doodles, and it unlocks so much for you as an artist. You’ll probably notice that you prefer drawing left to right or right to left, and you should use that to your advantage too: spin your page around! No one says you have to always draw right-side up. If you’d like to read more about this, I love the page on this from Drawabox, and I’ll link that in the description.

Thumbnailing and Warm-Ups

Thumbnailing! We’re not decorating our fingers or pretending to be shocked for YouTube, this one’s easy: draw small. Draw things tiny. Draw small and with a time limit. Wait doesn’t that sound frustrating? It actually does the opposite.

Regardless of whether you are just warming up to get started drawing for the day, or you are studying something unfamiliar to practice, or you’re thinking through some poses and you’re not sure how they will look… drawing that out in one try is not a recipe for success. Trying to get it right is how you get frustrated very quickly. Your goal when you are practicing art is to get those bad drawings out, accept them for being bad, and then move on. You have to do this to understand how art works, to make that eventual good drawing. if you’re doing this and you’re trying to get it right from the start, and you’re filling that sketchbook page with something you’re not happy with, you’re gonna hate the process real quickly.

Thumbnailing will save you from yourself. Small sizes and time limits put a cap on that frustration, giving you an end to look forward to. And it’s practice at the same time. About a sticky note size is usually the size I recommend. You can even draw on sticky notes if you prefer to do that. I like to just draw a few boxes in my sketchbook. My recommendation to start with is to give yourself four or five boxes to draw in, and no more than two minutes for each of them… maybe even as little as 30 seconds! Intentionally make a mess of it. Scream those bad drawings out onto your page.

This strategy helps kickstart my drawing because it gives me a way to warm up and really get some practice as I go, and I do this every time I start drawing because I know it’s the easier way. I actually just made a video on this; a technique I call the Storyboarding Warmup. Check that out. Usually once you’ve done just a few of these, you’ll have one that you like in a way you weren’t even expecting, and maybe you can practice it again. Draw it bigger!

Good art day, bad at day, you’ll always benefit from doing this. I know sometimes you might not feel like you have the energy for all of this up-front “work”, but I promise you it’s the easier option to default to. If you get through a few thumbnails and decide today’s not the right day, hey, that’s fine, and it’s waaaay less stressful than trying to “just” draw one thing for a while and failing at it.

Studies

Now studies, what’s this all about? We’re not going back to school, but we are going to do some learning in the same way that we would practice any kind of drawing. Get yourself a photo or something in your house or out your window or even another piece of art that you like. You’re going to try to draw exactly that.

The idea of this might sound a little boring, but it helps you build up two key things to brighten your mood for drawing: your confidence and your skills. If you combine the idea of studying with thumbnailing as I mentioned earlier, then you have a perfect recipe for warming up and setting yourself up for a cozy time making some art. The difference here is you don’t necessarily have to study art each day before you get started drawing other things. Sometimes you just wanna draw for fun from your imagination and that’s great. In fact, you need to make sure you are reserving time to do that too to draw without rules. But when you wanna keep pushing your skills along, studies are exactly how you do it. You have your creative drawings, and you have your learning drawings. Sometimes they overlap, but they don’t have to.

Literally looking at something, drawing it, and seeing what you did right and what you did wrong. You might hold your paper on top of your screen, or hold your pages up to the light. Compare your work and your reference. Find where your brain lied to you, what you didn’t even realize was wrong. Use cheap throw-away paper, tell yourself you’re just learning and you’re not even going to share it, remove that pressure. This is almost the entire process of learning art when you get past some fundamentals. Art schools will teach you the ways of studying, but ultimately, it’s on you to determine what you want to study and drive your progress forward. Once you realize that artistic improvement is a study practice, it really becomes your own choose-your-own-adventure.

As I mentioned earlier, I have a technique called the Storyboarding Warmup, and in that video, I talk about how studies can come into play in that process. Repeatedly drawing the same thing, noticing what you got wrong, and drawing it again. And again. Giving yourself time limits and small areas to draw forces you to zoom out and observe the whole drawing and limits your frustration. I always get pretty excited with myself when I defeat a study I was struggling with, and it’s always through repetition with small quick drawings.

Horizontal Flip

Ooooh, this one is probably my favorite, Because when I show it to someone who hasn’t tried it before, their reaction is always on the order of complete bewilderment. You can see their world shattered, opening up to this new sacred knowledge, and it’s a trick that seems so weirdly specific.

All right… first, the only way this trick really works is by experiencing it firsthand. If you’ve got a recent sketch you’ve made, digitally or traditionally, you’ll be able to try it out, hang on to that. What I will do on screen is show you some graphics I’ve drawn that represent how things seem to look in our minds, but I’ve obviously faked some of it for effect here. This effect does not work on someone else’s art. It only works on your own, so I’m trying to give you that experience here anyway with some exaggerated graphics.

So. Say you’ve been doing art for a little bit and you decide to go look back at some old drawings from a month or maybe a year ago. You’re usually going to find something that looks off. Sometimes it is way off. But you don’t remember it looking so bad when you were drawing it right? This phenomenon is related to our brains being very good liars. If you’ve ever tried to draw something unfamiliar from memory, say, an elephant, and realized that the picture in your head looks nothing like the disaster that appeared on your paper, a similar thing is happening here. Sometimes old art might not look as good because you have spent a lot of time studying things since then and realize that you could just do better now. But a lot of the time what’s happening is that even the you that was drawing that piece then would have noticed something was wrong, if that past you knew how to find it.

A skewed face. Crooked perspective. Completely bonkers shading. An arm on a character entirely not where it should be! Your brain tricked you into making these mistakes because you’ve been drawing something for a while, and the longer you look at it, no matter what you do, your brain will start to see it as “correct”. Even if it’s nowhere near close. But we can fool our brains with this stupid simple trick: your art? Flip it. Yep. …that’s it. Horizontal flip!

Got paper? Hold it up to a light flipped over. Be enlightened… Or take a picture with your phone and flip it there. Almost every art app has a button to flip your canvas this way. I use Procreate and have bound it to a squeeze gesture here. This sudden drastic change in your art is usually enough of a jump-scare to immediately realize that something’s not right and what to fix. It helps with studies, creative works, poses, expressions, absolutely everything. If you’ve ever thought that your art looked “better” one direction and wrong when flipped, that’s just your mind playing tricks. It looks like that both ways. Make yourself flip your canvas often and you’ll find the quickest way to self-critique your art and fix it as you go.

You might also wonder about vertically flipping your art and… well, you can, but I think that’s needlessly more difficult when trying to spot problems. Horizontal flip is usually all you need. K, now go scare your other artist friends with this.

Sleep on It

Yes, sleep. Horizontal flipping can show you mistakes, but you also do need to take breaks and sleep. Even if you sat down on a multi-hour drawing session and you feel like you’re really in the zone, not only, again, does your brain get trained to see what you’re drawing as correct, but you will start to get tired, and you’ll start to make mistakes that you notice less and less. And even if you feel like you’re making your best piece ever, you want that confidence of being able to see it later and going, yes. That IS awesome. I like that. So at the very least, if you’re feeling really proud of a piece, sleep on it at least once. That will give your brain that reset.

A lot of early artists, myself included, would always look at other artists and wonder how they have so many work in progress pieces, when you might just have one. Why jump around so much when you can just finish one thing at a time, right? Outside of commissions, a lot of those artists are jumping around to keep their ideas fresh and to give themselves that confidence that their art is looking good. Now, I’m not saying if you’re starting out drawing that you need to have multiple pieces going at any given time, just don’t try to do all of an art piece in one go.

If you were perplexed with any particular part of the painting process, you might have an idea of how to approach it in the morning. Really, not thinking about drawing is really useful for your creativity. This actually works in a lot of professional fields. You might get more ideas of what to put in your drawing if you were a little bit stumped. You might decide the next day, “you know what this was worth the shot, but I actually don’t like this work” and you shelved it. That’s okay. But it helps you rationalize what you like and what you don’t like, and that improves your skill each time you realize it. And when you do well, that confidence of seeing your drawing with fresh eyes and still liking it can really keep you motivated.

Keep that Paper

There is nothing that keeps you more connected with your art than pencil and paper. Whatever you want to draw, If you have a thing to draw with and a surface to draw it on, you’re set. It’s perfect.

So many people get this idea in their heads that digital art is the next step of their progress as an artist, and once they start digital art, that they’ll be done with their traditional practice. But that’s entirely the wrong way to look at it; they are two different mediums and digital is not a plain “upgrade” over drawing and painting in the physical world. If you are wanting to approach digital art, and that’s the kind of art you wanna share online, there’s nothing wrong with that — I do that too — and I’ll tell you how to make that happen in a moment. Stay with me a sec.

Drawing with pencil and paper means you don’t have to turn on your tablet. Your pencil doesn’t need drivers. You don’t need to close distractions on-screen. You don’t have to find the button for an eraser. It doesn’t need calibration. You don’t have to find the right brush. There are zero setup steps. I’m sure some of you will roll your eyes at this, going “Kanjon that all sounds like a skill issue” and yet I KNOW you’ve had to deal with tech issues before, and you deal with getting rid of distractions on your PC or tablet every time you sit down. Even if these feel insignificant, each one is something you have to climb over to get to drawing. Starting from a empty canvas, you don’t want that at all. Not while you’re sketching.

So you wanna be a digital artist? You’re gonna add digital to your list of mediums, but you’re not abandoning anything else. Try doing your warm-ups on paper, your thumbnailing. You can throw this stuff away! Get your brain working on the art in front of you and not working around the technology, at least while you’re sketching. Your sketch is the foundation of the rest of your piece, you want to give yourself every opportunity to get this right.

Now then. One of the best ways to make digital art, in my opinion, is to start your sketch… on paper. Thumbnail it. Feel it out. Flip it over. See what works and what doesn’t. Remove all of the hurdles of drawing and draw. Whenever you have a sketch that you like, sit your sketchbook down on your table, grab your phone, hold it over top and take a picture of it. Send it to yourself. Save it to your cloud drive. Airdrop that thing to your tablet. Whatever gets it there. Open that photo up in your art app of choice, crop it down to your sketch. Turn the opacity down a bit. Look at that, your sketch is digital! Pop open a new layer and trace some lines onto it. You’ve just done the same thing that you would have done sketching digitally, but you didn’t need to worry about fighting software to get your sketches out first.

Visually this is that hybrid process. The art is still mostly digital, but you keep the distractions out of the way when it’s important. I’ve been lucky to chat with some long time skilled artists who have also independently recommended this approach, and they’re super passionate about it for the same reasons. If you’ve been doing art a long time and don’t sketch traditionally, you’re not doing it wrong, but you too can probably benefit from trying it out. Sure, you feel comfy about your digital sketching skills, but an on-paper sketch can be some of the most peaceful, calming times where you discover new things about your art because you’re not stuck to your digital drawing workflow and set-up process.

We did it

That’s the six! Try writing these down at the front of your sketchbook; it’s a great place to keep reminders and some drawing ideas. Thanks for listening! If this is your first time visiting me, welcome! I hope this was useful and that you’ll consider subscribing for more fun stuff like this. For those interested, I have got the form for Q&A in the description. If you’ve felt stuck with your art, in your motivation or progress, and you wanna see what I can say on video about it, check it out! It’ll be up in a few weeks; one or two videos depending on how many questions I think I can get through. Until then, enjoy your art practice; chase that passion and be awesome.