Digital Drawing Exercises for beginners

Can it be frustrating being a beginner? Yes. Does it have to be? Not necessarily. When you have exercises to guide you along, you’ll find that it’s relatively easy to improve. Not as easy as, say, turning on the TV and letting your potential go to waste, but as easy as you’d like to make it. 

These Digital Drawing exercises for beginners are designed to get you improving in a relatively short span of time, and find it easier to draw with the tools provided. 

Here are a video to aid you, first off:

Next, we’ll get into some specific exercises.

Level 01 Drawing Exercises for Beginners:

Pressure sensitivity:

Controlling the flow of your digital brush is important for sketching, mark-making, and painting. It’s integral that you’re able to apply the amount of pressure necessary to get the result you want. Try making some lines across the picture plane and varying them in thickness. 

These are some custom brushes I made in procreate, you can see the pressure sensitivity applies to various degrees along each of these lines.

Shapes:

Simple shapes are foundational to drawing. Much like the videos above, basic shapes are what we can construct most other forms from. Drawing circles, spheres, cones, cylinders, and boxes are some of the best exercises a beginner can do. At first glance they may seem boring, but when you turn your boxes into cars and robots, and your cylinders into arms and legs, things start to turn up. 

Lines:

Many artists is deeply concerned with the quality of their lines when they start out. When it comes to digital drawing exercises for beginners, no list would be complete without talking lines. The best practices in this area involve a lot of play.

Try:

• Drawing lines as straight as you can as neatly as you can

• Drawing something rough, then drawing over it with cleaner precision

• drawing vertical, horizontal, and diagonal lines

• Finding comfortable ways to lay down lines (no matter how they look for now) without hurting your hand or wrist

Shading:

Forming the habit of shading is important when it comes to drawing. If you’re only drawing outlines, you’re missing out on a whole world of drawing possibility. Take some of the shapes you’ve drawn and shade them with a few crisp marks. Try cross hatching, try diagonal shading, so long as you’re adding some tone and form. It may not be pretty at first, but it’s important to start developing this skill and habit.

Level 02 Drawing Exercises For Beginners

Now that you’ve gotten your digital feet wet, it’s time to try working a bit more representational. These next few exercises will help you to develop your digital drawing ability further.

Draw a piece of produce from life:

Drawing a piece of produce will let you work on your organic forms— even if the produce isn’t! I want you to develop the habit of laying down your marks and lines as accurately as you can. Observe, draw a line or two, then repeat. Measure what you’ve drawn against what you’re going to draw next. Even if it comes out a bit disproportionate, you’ll be using everything from the level 01 exercises in an applicable and representational way. 

Draw a Knick-knack, toy, or sculpture from life:

Grab something from the store or around the house. Make sure it’s not too detailed. Place it where you can clearly see it and then observe it deeply. Let everything else in the world matter less as you focus all of your attention upon this object and your exercise. Capture the curves, the edges, and the big shape first, then work your way gradually toward the details. Don’t get overwhelmed if it turns our wonky or strange, it’s to be expected. If you nail it or do very well, don’t get too haughty either - you’ll blind yourself from seeing future mistakes, or get too lax in your focus. 

At any rate, both of these exercises are perfect for beginners, as learning to work digitally from life bridges the gap between both worlds, and will bolster your drawing abilities greatly if done habitually. 

Level 03 Drawing Exercises for Beginners:

Imagination Application:

After taking a break from your life drawings, draw from imagination something similar. Recall the shapes, curves, edges, and qualities. Shade aptly as you complete your line work. Evaluate the final - as how it differed from the referenced-from-life work. 

Level 04 Drawing Exercises for Beginners:

Free time:

Just draw whatever you’d like from reference ( I usually just grab something off Pinterest.) Use all of the exercises you’ve done to start piecing them together. Once you’re able to start executing level 4, you’re in good shape to start becoming intermediate, as opposed to a beginner. This may take up to a year or two if you’re not really consistent in your studies, but don’t focus so much on the outcome, simply focus on the process.

Conclusion

Breaking things down into exercises and levels helps provide some structure. You can take a huge reference folder of art you’ll Ike and do the same to advance even quicker. Develop you own exercises and you’ll develop your own techniques and style.

Practice daily and don’t break the chain. You’ll often surprise yourself and find some of the most creatively fulfilling moments this way. However, it’s best to simply focus on the day-to-day, moment-to-moment work, as that’s the reality we live in.

Don’t be so outcome-dependent, because the practice is the goal.  Digital drawing exercises for beginners will become digital drawing exercises for the adept before you know it. 

Whenever you're ready, there are 3 ways I can help you:

1. Grow & Sharpen Your Drawing Skills here. (1,800+ students)

2. Build better Paintings and get Commissions here. (500+ students)

3. Work 1:1 with me to grow your art, art-related income streams, or your creative potential

Happy drawing.