Fun Art Workouts

With this fun warm-up exercise, you can get to know a new pen better. You don't need reference to do this drawing exercise. Draw one-inch rectangles, and try to come up with creative textures to fill them with. Then try to draw a texture gradient in a longer rectangle. Lastly, try to put a texture on a three-dimensional form. See this exercise.

This is a set of drawing exercises you can do anywhere and any time. You don't need any image reference. The exercises help you become better at drawing lines accurately and with intent. They are also great warm-up exercises. See this exercise.

Create a sketch with a strong focal point. See this exercise.

Drawing something with one single line, letting the pen just roam over the paper, can be really fun—and liberating!

It also often yields beautiful results that look good when framed and hung on a wall, or as a tattoo, or as a social media post. The additional benefit is that you can often create many in a day.

There are communities online where you can find beautiful examples. See this exercise.

Typography is a fundamental of design and useful to study for any visual artist. Drawing them can lead to beautiful sketchbook pages, and it is fun to design your own type. So open your sketchbook and give it a shot! See this exercise.

Draw folds. See this exercise.

Draw many small quick thumbnails to design something. See this exercise.

Draw animals. See this exercise.

Draw hands. See this exercise.

Draw cartoon or comic variations of faces. See this exercise.

Draw the various facial features. See this exercise.

Try out different ways to construct the head in many orientations. See this exercise.

Gesture drawing is about noting down human poses quickly. This greatly helps you understand poses, how to express emotion through poses, and because of its loose nature it gives you the ability to make your poses more expressive when they feel too stiff. A crucial exercise for any visual artist.

And, it creates beautiful sketchbook pages! See this exercise.

Drawing from memory really is an amazing drawing exercise. I know of no other way to become better at feeling when lines are off.

What’s more, you can even do it if you don’t have drawing tools with you. Just draw it from memory when you get back to your drawing tools. See this exercise.

Find reference of a pose, and reference of a dressed person, and pose that person in that pose: combine two reference photos and turn it into something new. See this exercise.

Remember when you looked at clouds and saw things in them?

This exercise is something like that. We humans tend so see patterns in things. It is a fun way to jog your creativity. Take a stain or an object and turn it into something else you can see in it. See this exercise.

Find something you think looks beautiful - a human, location, object - and draw it carefully from observation. See this exercise.

Draw organic volumes. Draw cross-contour lines to to make sure you understand their volumes. See this exercise.

Everything can be approximated with boxes, spheres, cylinders and cones, and it is a good exercise to practice drawing these from many orientations. See this exercise.

When drawing, we map the three-dimensional world on a two-dimensional surface, creating an abstract composition of two-dimensional shapes that hopefully look pleasing. For this exercise, look at things, and find the abstract two-dimensional shapes in them that make them so pleasing to look at. See this exercise.