Creative Drawing Exercises To Get Your Pencil Moving

I enjoy simple Creative Drawing Exercises that help me to get my pencil moving and to work my drawing muscles. Drawing exercises that practice simple strokes, improve spatial awareness and help develop a steady hand. In today’s post let’s explore some fun drawing exercises to get your pencil moving.

The Creative Drawing Exercises

Begin With A Circle

It can be difficult to make that first mark on a blank page, so I always suggest to start by drawing a large shape of your choice, right in the middle of your page. My favourite shape is a circle. It defines your space and gives you a boundary within which you will be drawing. You can choose any size of circle that you feel you will be able to work within. Now we draw!

A Single Line

Once you have drawn your circle, or whatever geometric or freeform shape you have chosen to draw within, the next thing is to determine what simple drawing exercise you would like to fill it with.

This first one of the creative drawing exercises I will share is very simple, quick and encourages me to keep my pencil moving. I set my pencil down at one edge of my circle and I draw one continuous, twisty line, winding in and around itself, but never crossing itself. I keep drawing until I have filled the entire circle, ending again somewhere on the edge of the circle.

The key points here are,

never lift my pencil,
never cross my line,
fill the entire circle.

This is a great exercise for training your eye to navigate and work with space in your drawing. An example of this exercise is the image below on the left.

There are endless ideas you can do with this one. Try drawing patterns into your line such as spirals, scallops or flowers. Below on the right you can see an example of spiral shapes. Your pattern will come out different every time. The freebie for this tutorial is a worksheet that you can printout and then trace the line so that you can get the feel for this exercise yourself.

Try a Single Shape

For the next one of the creative drawing exercises, we will choose one shape and fill the entire circle with it. The shapes can be spaced apart, touching each other or they can be overlapped.

In the image below on the left, I chose circles and ovals of various sizes, filling the space up completely.

In the Image below on the right, I chose a petal shape. The petal shape is so versatile as you can change it’s form to flow around each other. It is a great way to practice different sizes and forms of petals. In this exercise I spaced my petals out.

These drawing exercises are to help you build up your drawing skills, so choose shapes that challenge you or that you would like to improve on.

Dividing Up Your Circle

In the next technique, we are going to divide up our initial shape even further. This is done by drawing multiple, randomly placed lines, across your circle. These lines can be wavy, twisty, long or short. Each line begins on one edge of the circle and ends on a different part of the circle edge. You can draw as many or as few of these as you would like. The more lines, the smaller the spaces will be to fill. The result is the circle is divided up into smaller sections that are irregular and different every time you do it.

Now that your shape has been divided up, we can now start filling up the smaller sections. We can use the same ideas as we did in the above examples, filling them each separately. Use a continuous line or try filling them up with different shapes. The smaller sections are even easier to fill up quickly.

Below on the left, I have used a line that traces around the inside of each section, spiralling inward and following the contour of that section.

Below on the right, I have filled each shape with petals, flowing together towards one direction as a cluster, within each individual section. I changed up the direction of their flow with each new section.

Use Your Creative Drawing Exercises Daily

There are so many simple and fun ideas you can use to get your pencil moving and improve your drawing skills. These ideas are just a few, and you can use them to expand on, to create more exercises. Start with the free worksheet and then try creating your own. Other ideas would be to try overlapping your shapes, or try outlining them, to fill in the spaces. Perhaps you can do a combination of two different shapes to fill the spaces, such as flowers and circles. The ideas are endless. Enjoy adding creative drawing exercises into your daily drawing habit

DRAWING FREEBIES HERE

Challenge yourself to try one of these exercises every day. They are simple, and they are just like basic drills you would practice in sports, music or lettering and calligraphy. It is the simple, daily practices that move us forward and help us grow in our drawing. They are easy, fun, quick and a great way to start your morning or end your day. Have fun with these and let me know how it goes for you.

Would you like to see more drawing exercises, PLUS Printable Worksheets to Practice on?

Then Come on Over and Visit me in A Full Class HERE
with many more ideas and exercises to try