Drawing exercise for your brain
So very last minute tonight I decided to join in on Linescapes live drawing session that they have on Youtube every Monday. And it was so much more fun than I expected. Tonight they challenged everyone to do a creative exercise where you take small objects from your home and make them the subject of your drawings.
It’s such a simple concept, anyone can do it. But it can be quite hard at first because it requires you to stop looking at the object for what it is, and start seeing it as something else.
And this is where the creative exercise comes in. Because by doing this you practice shutting off the “logical thinking” part of your brain, and instead forces you to turn on your “spatial thinking”. And this is the part of your brain that you need to use if you want to become good at drawing.
So if you want to try this, here’s what you need:
A pen - any pen works, I used a regular 0,5 fineliner
Some paper - any paper works, I used some watercolour paper because it was the closest thing I had at hand
Around 5-15 objects - they can be aaaanything you want, the only requirement really is that they need to be small enough to fit on your paper so you can draw around it
Your drawing objects can literally be anything.
As you can see here I collected tape, a tube of paint, a knife, some paint pans, scissors, a ruler, Ipren, my EarPods, some pasta, nail polish, a ring, two batteries, a bracelet and a paper clip.
I only ended up using about half of them, but it was still nice to have a lot of options to chose from.
And here you can see my results!
It was a bit hard to get started, but once I got over the hump and made the first one (the crocodile) all of the other ones just kind of followed. The EarPods that became a trash can was the last one I did, and it’s definitely my favorite. And all of this was done in maybe 45 minutes. I could’ve gone on longer because it was so much fun but the session was ending and it was getting late so…
But really, you don’t have to spend that long on it either if you think it’s too much time to take out of your day. Just pick an object or two and doodle while you’re having breakfast or lunch or something. It can be a great little exercise to break up your day a bit.
And as you can see you don’t have to be able to draw particularly “pretty” either. As long as you can make it somewhat recognizeable, I promise you’ll be amazed by what you come up with!
And if you think this style is cool, Christoph Niemann & Jesuso Ortiz are two people who do maaagical illustrations using this concept! I highly recommend you check them out.
Happy creating!
