Learn Basic Drawing First to Impress Art School Admissions Counselors

If you want to draw, paint or sculpt people, objects and places realistically you’ll need to learn Basic Drawing skills first.

If you try to skip this foundational step, you’ll try and try to create what you’re seeing, or the vision you have in your mind, and it will be difficult for you to get right and it will take you much longer to create a final Art Portfolio that you’ll feel really proud of submitting.

No matter how much creative talent you have, you have to consistently work on developing it, by first following and practicing certain drawing rules and techniques.

Admissions Counselors of the top Art Programs value your ability to draw objects, people and surroundings realistically.

They want to see evidence that you are able to draw what you see, so it’s important to take the time to learn Basic Drawing for your Art Portfolio.

That’s why we’ve expanded our in person experience through our new online Basic Drawing course. It’s an engaging, flexible, and accessible art course that will empower you to explore your creative potential and develop your drawing skills at your own pace. And we’ll send you the workbook and ALL the Materials you’ll need

We begin our Basic Drawing Course by asking you to make a series of Blind Drawings- a widely used method where you draw a subject without looking at your drawing, with a demonstration video.

Throughout the entire Blind Drawing exercise, your eyes will be fixated on the subject that you are observing, while you draw on paper without looking down to see what you’re doing.

It will look like a bunch of scribbles that don’t make sense, but that is the point of the exercise.

By staring at the subject continually, rather than at the paper to see what you’re doing, this forces you to slow down, and take time to look at the object to analyze it. Looking closely and really seeing the details and nuances of things and people and places is key to being able to draw them realistically.

Following this are other exercises that will help you develop your drawing skills, by showing you how to see and render form, perspective, light, value and composition.

Including Contour Drawing which is another basic drawing technique that will help your observation skills.

This style of drawing is when your eyes constantly go back and forth between the subject and your drawing while transferring your visual information directly to your hand movement.

Once you start your line, you draw continuously as your eyes move. Your line should be one, single, clean line that does not go back and forth thus not repeating the information that you already drew.

You’ll also learn Freehand Pen Drawing where you make various marks with a pen, using marks that convey the feeling of the texture well, adjusting the pressure of the pen to create a range from thinner lines, medium-thick lines, to darker and thicker lines by overlapping multiple lines over each other.

Then you will learn the basics of Pencil Drawing and Shading. A pencil is one of the most versatile materials to work with and you will learn to draw from direct, visual observation, catch details of the subjects, and avoid drawing from your memories.

You’ll learn why we use a layered approach to create values on graphite pencils, how to control your pencil direction and pressure to achieve a smooth tone in the consistent quality of lines by making mini observational drawings using all the information you learned previously, and how the mark makings are applied to different textures of the objects.

Then you’ll learn about Shading and Volume. By learning to shade basic 3-dimensional geometric shapes, seeing how light reacts to these shapes, will make the understanding of shading much easier on any subject that you draw later for your Art Portfolio

Then finally you’ll end the course by drawing a Still Life using a grid system that’s of equal ratio on both your reference picture and your workspace to help you draw the image on our paper.

And then a Positive and Negative Space Drawing, creating a pattern outline for the negative space, using a ruler and measuring out the negative space.

With each section of the Basic Drawing Course you’ll begin to see everything through the lenses of form, perspective, light, value and composition, and the effect will be that your artwork will significantly improve.

We’ve seen many times that students frustrated with their current skill level develop incredibly quickly by following the basic art exercises outlined in this course, and then move on to making the work they’ve imagined in their mind, work that really impresses admissions counselors at the top art schools.

You can sign up now for our Online Basic Drawing Course!

https://course.ashcanartlibrary.com/

We are excited to expand our hands-on experience through our new online art courses. Our mission is to deliver engaging, flexible, and accessible art education to you across the globe, empowering you to explore their creative potential and refine your artistic skills at your own pace. By leveraging the power of technology, we strive to make art education inclusive and adaptable to the needs of each individual learner. Our diverse range of expertly designed online courses not only inspires personal artistic growth but also fosters connections with a vibrant, global artistic community. email us: infomanhattan@ashcanart.com for more information