Lesson 1: Lines, Ellipses and Boxes

When it comes to the marks you draw in this course, there are three overarching rules:

• Marks should be continuous and unbroken

• Marks should flow smoothly

• Marks must maintain a consistent trajectory

Let's look at each of these in more detail.

This essentially means that every line we draw should consist of a single mark. Beginners, due to their heavy reliance on drawing from their wrist, tend to make very short marks. When they want to achieve a longer stroke, they'll draw a lot of overlapping marks, building that line up gradually in what is known as "chicken scratching".

In other cases, students may find situations where they want to represent certain lines in dashed or dotted lines (for example, if we're drawing "through" a box, as though we have x-ray vision, we may draw the edges on the opposite side of the form in such a way).

Neither of these strategies should be employed during this course. Every drawing here is an exercise, and one of the overarching goals is to help train you to be more confident and purposeful in your marks. This means executing every line in a single, intentional stroke.

The act of drawing a line has two main challenges:

• We want to draw our lines to be accurate

• We want to draw our lines to be smooth

Beginners often prioritize accuracy first, thinking that it's more important that their lines reach their intended points - but this is incorrect. The most important thing you need to focus on first is keeping your marks smooth and consistent.

The reason is simple: we can generally execute pretty smooth marks now, by simply changing the way in which we approach the task. If we draw as confidently as we can, without concern for where we want the line to fall, our marks will always come out smoothly - just not accurately.

Smooth flow is something we achieve by the approach we employ. Accuracy on the other hand is something that will improve with practice. Nail down your confident stroke now, from your shoulder, and as you practice it, your accuracy will catch up as well.

If you do the opposite, focusing on accuracy now, it will be vastly more difficult to make those marks smooth with practice. It may work eventually, but I wouldn't want to wait around to find out.

There are a lot of situations where you want to capture something that has a repeating pattern. When doing so, don't attempt to capture it all at once. Instead of zigzagging back and forth and repeating the same pattern, break it up into separate strokes, each one with a single purposeful trajectory.

When dealing with a smoother wave, it's often better to start with a smooth line, and then build individual "bumps" onto it. We'll use this quite a bit in Lesson 3, when we draw the wavy edge detail on leaves.

When drawing something more jagged, like fur, it's important that you purposely design the tufts of fur, making a stroke to go up, a stroke to come back down again, another going up once more, and so on. This allows us to be intentional in how we make the marks.

Zigzagging back and forth, on the other hand, will cause us to go into auto-pilot, as all repeating patterns tend to. This will result in the same, boring, flat outcome that will lose all sense of character and intentional control. Avoid it wherever you can.