Develop your skills
In a new three-part series, Tom Cringle suggests some basic drawing and sketching exercises to help improve your landscape painting skills – think of it as warming up, like limbering up in the gym
In a new three-part series, Tom Cringle suggests some basic drawing and sketching exercises to help improve your landscape painting skills – think of it as warming up, like limbering up in the gym
Ihave learnt many things, perhaps the most important of these is not to forget to enjoy the actual process of making art, and not to worry too much about the result. Obviously how a picture looks when finished is important, but we must not rush to the end. We must remember to enjoy creating it.
It is possible to over-complicate your approach or just not know when to stop. I believe that we sometimes forget to keep things simple, especially when we are starting to learn to draw or paint or are trying to move forward.
I have spent a lot my ‘teaching time’ working in the prison service. Here we teach with limited materials, restricted subject content and little time. These factors have made me focus on what is most important in teaching art and what are the best, most straightforward and enjoyable ways to help others grasp techniques.
Over the past 12 months I have made many short tutorials, both video and written, that people can use to learn the basics and beyond. In this article (and the two that will follow) I have tried to boil down my knowledge and experience to produce a set of simple short tutorials that you can follow to refresh your own art, remind yourself of the basics, simplify your approach and, I hope, just remind you to enjoy the process.
For all these exercises you will need paper and pencils, soft if possible (Bs to HB). Charcoal and pens can be used but start with pencil if you can.
Doodle
Sometimes people forget that at the heart of our drawings are basic marks, lines and shapes. A collection of lines that has no meaning or point is sometimes called a doodle. To ‘doodle’ is defined as to ‘scribble absentmindedly’. But I think we should give the ‘doodle’ more credit. I believe it is important to use the doodle more, if not only for the sheer joy of drawing, but as a way of warming up. The doodle can be the first step as we begin to get creative.
What can we learn from the doodle? The first point of the doodle is to remind you that anyone who can make marks on a piece of paper, and who can connect those marks, can draw and can
be creative. The second point is that making marks for their own sake is both fun and creative.
If you want to take this further give your ‘doodle art’ a title and see if you can then transform the image using shading or colouring into this ‘named art’.
If you are in a household or group with two or more people, hand your doodles round to each other to shade in. A favourite exercise in my art groups is for everyone to put random picture names into a hat. When each person draws a title out of the hat, they have to use their imagination to add the narrative by using colour and shade to complete the picture.
Continuous line
Continuous line is a well-known drawing technique used by many artists as part of the process of creating work through sketching, or as the completed art itself. For the purposes of our exercises I want you to think of continuous line as simply keeping the pencil on the paper and not lifting the pressure off; even when you are moving across the paper from one part to another, keep the tip of the pencil on the page.
I use continuous line to sketch freely and quickly. It is a technique that, once you are confident with it, will transform the speed and effectiveness of your sketching. It is a type of drawing where the line pressure and the quality of the line can add so much feeling to the drawing (below). It is a style of drawing that I believe everyone can learn, it is natural to use and is born from the doodle.
In the next articles I will look more at landscapes and how to introduce
the ‘basic shape’ and continuous line sketching into your work. I will also look at choosing locations for plein-air work and picking the best photos to work from when working from your home or studio.