Learn to draw: Simple drawing exercises for beginners

Like any other skill, drawing also needs consistent practice and dedication to get to the professional level. Unable to make straight lines or fine circles, and making uneven and disproportionate drawings despite careful steps, may come from a lack of basic skills that are ignored when you are learning how to do a pencil sketch.

Even if you’re an advanced artist, these skills might easily be forgotten if you don’t practice them much.

So, here are some engaging and simple drawing exercises to learn drawing

1. Still life from a single light

This drawing exercise involves drawing a still life illuminated by a single light source. This exercise helps you to understand the Light source on your drawing objects. Use simple objects with not many twists and turns and avoid using reflective or transparent objects (like glass) in your early stages when you are learning to draw.

When you are done with one still life, you can change the direction of the light and then repeat the process. This will give you an insight into how light and shadows work.

Here’s one such still life is drawn by one of our former students. You need not draw all the objects you may start by drawing a cup.

2. Exploring the theme

Many times, we want to draw something fascinating we witnessed but our minds steer us away from that. The image in our heads doesn’t conform to what we saw. In such cases, we need to re-calibrate the mind to make it flexible and see shapes instead of whatever it thinks an object looks like. 

In this simple drawing exercise, you just need to pick a theme, like eyes, flowers, hair, so on and draw several different-looking versions of them. Your brain might force you to align with the prototype, but you need to remind yourself that you’re experimenting and “stretching” your mind muscles.

3. Don’t look at your pencil sketch

Yes, this sounds tough but is necessary for mind-hand coordination and to boost your confidence.

You simply have to gather your drawing materials and start drawing your subject. Just this time draw it half-blind; don’t look at it. You can also put your sketchbook on your lap and draw underneath the table, or try sticking the pencil through the middle of a paper plate and drawing like that.

So now the outcome remains secret and until then you can just focus on concentrating on the work while not worrying about the results.

4. Different perspectives 

Here you just have to take one object and draw it from different or unusual perspectives. For example, draw a chair from directly above, lateral sides, or looking down towards it. These simple drawing exercises will make you draw what you see and prevent you from clinging to the standard forms.

For a better understanding, you can also check out our Perspective tutorials which can help you in

5. Five Minute Burn

This is the best one on the list where you just start your timer and begin drawing whatever is in front of you. The catch is to capture maximum information presented in front of you and avoiding details that would help in developing your instinctive skills.

Many more similar and simple drawing exercises can be found on the online sketching course. Enrolling in such courses would help you develop the skills and enhance your pencil sketches to become a pro.