Some days it feels like your muse has packed up and left home, leaving you staring at a blank page. If you're finding yourself stuck for ideas, try one of these drawing ideas to get you started. You never know, once you start getting some marks on paper, your muse might just decide to come back and join in the fun. If you're struggling to find the time or energy to make art, maybe you need to find some ways to renew your creative energy.
Cross Contours are basically imaginary lines across the surface of an object, like a grid or mesh draped across so it fits the form perfectly. While the pure contour focusses on the edges of the form, the cross contour helps us to describe its three-dimensional surface. Check out this article on Cross Contours and put them to work in your own drawing.
What is pure contour drawing? Chances are, you already do it, as it tends to be the instinctive approach to drawing, representing visible edges with a line. This pure contour tutorial explains what's involved.
Here's a different approach to value drawing that will really get you working in rich tones instead of tentative shading. Line is forbidden! You start with a base of mid-tone pencil and think in terms of light and dark to create a beautifully atmospheric still life. Try a large version that you can work energetically, or create a small, condensed image that forces you to forget about detail. Do the Value Drawing Exercise.
There's paper... and then there's art paper. Find out what paper is made from and why not all papers are suitable for art. Click on to page two to find out how to care for your precious pages!
Ever wondered what that peering-at-a-pencil thing is about? While it might look like an arcane ritual or secret hand signal, in fact it is a simple and effective method of measuring your model. To use the technique for other subjects just choose a suitable object as your 'baseline' measurement (in life drawing, you use the figure's head.)
Find out how to:Measure up the model, Judge Angles in a pose, and draw the structure of objects.
Thumbnail sketching is basically small, quick, simple sketching that you use to jot down an idea, record a detail or figure out a composition, among other things. Thumbnail sketches don't have to make sense to anybody else - though they can be creative, they are really a visual shorthand, a note-to-self.
In my never-ending quest to do less housekeeping and more drawing, I've been checking out Housewares / Appliances on About.com. Guide Mariette Mifflin reviews all kinds of appliances and handy household gadgets, and also has some great kitchen organizing tips. I reckon I could probably apply this advice to my art supplies too!
This guy collects mechanical pencil refills. Seriously. Painting Guide, Marion Boddy-Evans, sent me the link for Dave's Mechanical Pencils: A Few Leads - strange but rather interesting. There's quite a bit of useful stuff on the site, including detailed reviews of mechanical pencils, plus a brief look at some wood-cased pencils in Wooden Week.
I was looking out of my window at a wonderfully untidy clump of long-stemmed yellow flowers that are growing beside a large blue pot, and wondered why I hadn't drawn them yet. I could do the sort of drawing that I so admired in Richard Bell's Rough Patch garden sketchbook. So why not? Because it takes time. There's quite a few, and complex, in that rambling, informal-garden kind of way. It would take a good hour or so. Which doesn't sound a lot, but an entire, uninterrupted hour is a rare thing for most of us, isn't it! But I think I will draw them, tomorrow. After I've put on the laundry, tidied the house and played fetch with the puppy until he's ready for a nap. So that rather than a hurried photograph, I will have given that hour of thought and line and color to my subject, and I'll always remember their golden scruffiness in the last warm rays of autumn sunshine.
What would you like to draw - and why haven't you drawn it yet?
Cross Contours are basically imaginary lines across the surface of an object, like a grid or mesh draped across so it fits the form perfectly. While the pure contour focusses on the edges of the form, the cross contour helps us to describe its three-dimensional surface. Check out this article on 
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Ever wondered what that peering-at-a-pencil thing is about? While it might look like an arcane ritual or secret hand signal, in fact it is a simple and effective method of measuring your model. To use the technique for other subjects just choose a suitable object as your 'baseline' measurement (in life drawing, you use the figure's head.)
