Do you love the idea of being creative but feel like your drawing skills are inadequate?

A phrase I often hear from people is ‘I can’t draw or I’m not very good at drawing’.

You may want to learn how to create pattern repeats but don’t feel like your drawing skills are good enough so you stop that from letting you start.

Practice every day

The first thing I want to say is that if you can put pen to paper, you can absolutely draw.  The truth is, it does take practice but if you do put in the time, you will notice your drawing skills getting better over time. Of course.  I highly recommend taking the time to do it a little bit every day. The more time you put in to really practice the better and better you will get.

Think of it as a muscle that needs exercising. You really will see an improvement if you do practice a little bit every day.

To help you get started. I wanted to give you a few little exercises that you can try that will really help loosen up your drawings and stop you from overthinking the outcomes.

Drawing exercises

Blind drawing

Blind drawing is really great for getting out of your head and being open and free.

The way it works is that you only look at the object you are drawing and not the page you are drawing on. This will free up your drawing and stop you from drawing what you think something looks like. You can be really free and open with this process. When you finish, you may even find interesting sections that you could potentially use to further develop into a pattern. I love this exercise for really letting you stop your thinking getting in the way of your creating.

Continuous line drawing

Another really fun drawing exercise is a continuous line drawing.

In a continuous line drawing you are able to look at both your subject and your page however you are not allowed to take your pencil off the page when you’re drawing. This ideas is once again to really loosen you up and look at your subject in a different way. So once again, try not to overthink the outcome or make it perfect.

Drawing with the opposite hand

Drawing with the opposite hand you normally do, is also a great way of warming up and practicing your drawing skills.

This also will get you out of that perfectionism mindset and allow you to just open to creating.

Drawing every day

It’s really common for us to want everything to be perfect and to be super self critical about what we create. So if you’re stuck in the cycle of thinking that your skills aren’t good enough or you really want to improve your drawing skills then make sure you practice.

A great exercise is to select an object and draw that same object every single day. You don’t have to allocate much time, it could be a few minutes. Just by practicing a little every day, you will be amazed at how much your skills will improve.