I've been asked numerous times by my students and up-and-coming young professionals what's the one thing that will help them get better at their art. My answer is invariably "Life drawing!" You cannot have too much life drawing. I believe drawing is the key to everything. It is essential to your "voice".

Everyone wants to dive in and have the instant gratification of seeing work materialize before their eyes. Hey, I'm with you on wanting that. But so many seem unwilling to put the time in to learn how to truly draw, unwilling to do the hard work necessary to achieve their goal of instant gratification. Before you can run you have to learn how to walk. Before you can sing you need to learn how to talk. This is learning how to walk and talk. How can you focus on "what" your saying if you're still struggling with "how" to say it?

And while you're at it, draw large. Drawing from life should be more of a full body experience where you can cut loose a bit, be freer. If you'll draw larger then your work will begin to reflect a sense of the monumental, and this will carry over into your smaller works as well. So, get a pad of newsprint that's at least 18 x 24 inches. Using newsprint is important, don't get nice paper. The beauty of newsprint is that it's cheap and you don't mind burning through the pages. Fill them up, don't slow down. Crank away!

SPEED DRAWING
The regimen that I give my students is this: My class is five hours long. We come in and get prepared to draw. The model takes the stand and the first thing we do is a series of 5-second drawings. 5-seconds! There's no way that you're going to do incredible drawings in 5 seconds. That's the point. It relieves you of the burden of having to worry about making great drawings. It also relieves you of the burden of thinking. Turn your brain off. React to what's in front of you. Learn to trust your instincts while you draw. When you turn on the brain and start to analyze, you turn off intuition and you suck the life out of whatever you're working on. Just wallow in the energy. The speed you'll be drawing will also warm your arm up like nothing else.

You'll be locking on to the shape of the thing before you, seeing the silhouette. Shapes will become more important than details. You don't have time for details anyway, not at the speed we're drawing. Eyes, nose, ears, these things will become less important. Instead you'll be struggling to get to the heart of what you're seeing—the gesture, the movement. The details will come later, when you have more time at your disposal. But for now, just respond to the visual stimuli.

We do the 5-second thing for 30-minutes to one hour. Students are burning through their newsprint pads. But they begin to see the shape of the figure, the gesture, the motion. You will hit a rhythm and find yourself flying along, drawing by instinct. Next we jump to 15-seconds and do that for awhile. Then jump to 30-seconds and on to a whole minute. Each increment in time is still handled in the 5-second speed. Draw with the same frenetic pace, feeling the lines, trusting yourself as you go.

Be bold, make a statement with each and every line you put down. There is no such thing as the "perfect line." So quit hunting for it. Put the lines down and move on. Each line informs the next line which informs the one after that. By the time you get to one minute you'll feel like you have all the time in the world. Your eye will be registering so much more information than you thought possible. And you'll be putting down whole statements. The drawings will have a point. You'll be training your hand and eyes to work together, locking on and transcribing with feeling what you see.

After the 30-second jump I then push on to one minute. A whole minute! It really will seem as though you have too much time. Where you once were tickling a section of a drawing, micro-managing, you'll now be putting lines down confidently and moving on. Two minutes, three, four, five — you won't know what to do with yourself.

Make sure to work with the same 5-second speed, don't tighten up and start micro-managing again. Everyone is so enamored with detail that they miss the obvious structural necessities in their drawings. Detail is eye candy and people are drawn to it like magpies to bright objects. But hold back if you can and deal with the larger issues before throwing details around and cluttering up your images. The way I illustrate this for my students is by bringing up "Charlie Brown's Christmas". Charlie and Linus go out and pick up that scrawny tree and throw a pile of decorations (details) on it. It's still a crappy little tree. The decorations don't hide that fact. If the structure of what you're working with is shaky, then no amount of detail is going to help. People throw in detail to try and hide the fact that the drawing doesn't work in the first place. It's a poor substitute for solid structure.

So work the larger shapes and then add some key details where they're truly needed. It's about designing your picture, designing where the eye should be going as opposed to where it tends to go.

The hardest thing a student faces is turning off the knowledge of what it is they're drawing. They see a face or a figure and have immediately already lost the battle because of all the visual baggage they carry around, the symbols in their heads. We know what a nose looks like, so when we see a nose we turn off seeing the nose in front of us and pull a nose from the visual library in our heads. Same for eyes, ears, mouths, etc. As students, as artists, we need to train ourselves to really look again, to see. Like the difference between hearing and listening.

A lot of this speed drawing came from my living in New York for 18 years and drawing on the subway. When I first started drawing on the subway I would get carried away by the details I was seeing in people's faces, their coats, etc. I could never really finish a sketch because the person I was drawing would get off the train! I quickly had to adapt to the available time, as well as the bumping and jostling of the fast-moving cars and the constantly flashing lights. So speed became an issue.

On the trains you might get a full minute with someone before they get off the train. That's if you were lucky. So this forced me to get to the point, to the heart of the thing I was seeing. It didn't happen over night, but I did get there through perseverance. I noticed that this was also creeping into my life drawings from models. And what's more, when I worked from the photographic reference I would take, I began to incorporate this method there as well. I treated the photograph as a live model, drawing quickly and deliberately before they left the stage. It keeps the work fresh and spontaneous and it looks done from life.

Another thing that's good to do is to switch instruments while sketching in the wild or drawing from a model. When you find that you're cranking away on something and you're just flying along, throw yourself a curve and change what you're drawing with. If you're using a sharp pencil, start working with a blunt crayon. Suddenly, what was working for you a moment before is not working now. This keeps you on your toes, forces you to deal with the material, forces you to really look again at what's in front of you. It's a jab to complacency which is a killer of just about all the arts if it sets in.

Hell, try other things as well, make drawing a game. When I'm teaching at the Illustration Academy we have figure drawing on Tuesdays and Thursdays. One thing Gary Kelley, John English, Sterling Hundley and myself do is switch hands and draw left-handed. Gary and Sterling are great at it. John and I do a bit more struggling with it, but we surprise ourselves all the time. It also forces you to really look again.

Other games. Durwin Talon showed me a fun exercise which he calls "falling water." Both hands draw at the same time, beginning at the top of the page and working their way down the page. There's a rhythm that you find which allows the two hands to sort of dance in and out of each other's way, and the drawings are pretty neat.

Scott Hampton and I used to sit in the 24-hour Greek diner below my Brooklyn apartment, drinking coffee and sketching 'til the wee hours of the morning. We'd switch sketchbooks, he drawing in mine and I drawing in his, and we'd give each other assignments to do. It usually involved working out of our heads, which Scott can do wonderfully. We also did blind profiles, closing our eyes and doing faces which we'd then fill with crazy dialogue. It was a lot of fun.

Try this: Place your pad against your chest and draw the model in front of you. The model's head goes at the top of your page, and work the piece like a mirror image. If the model is facing you then his/her left arm faces your right arm. So draw it like that. When you're done and flip your pad around, you've actually transposed the figure, creating the mirror image. The drawings are surprisingly interesting.

Anyway, life drawing is essential, I believe in any artist's study. It keeps the work fresh, reminds the artist of things they've forgotten, etc. I wish I could do more than I do.

NOTE:
Any other interesting drawing games out there? Let me know!