This is what I look like.

Welcome to this new video.

Today I'm going to share with you what I think is the best art exercise or drawing exercise you can possibly do.

This is something I came up with years ago before I moved to New York City to study at an academy, an atelier.

I really wanted to get better at drawing on my own.

I wanted to get more accurate so people wouldn't make fun of me.

They still made fun of me, but not about drawing.

My drawing was on point because of this exercise.

I'm going to share with it, share with it, I'm going to share it with you today.

I really think it's going to be great.

It's something you can do on your own.

You can check your own progress.

You don't need a guy like me looking over your shoulder telling you when you're right and wrong.

No, no.

You'll be able to tell because that is built into this wonderful exercise.

So let's get into it.

But first, let's start with the materials you're going to need so you can do this effectively on your own.

First, you're going to need a printout or a sheet of paper that has some kind of reference of a portrait, a model, or anything for that matter on an eight and a half by 11 sheet of paper.

It could be a little bigger or smaller, but roughly this size would be good.

Now, you don't want to have it in a book because you're going to really want to take this sheet and put it on a drawing board next to the paper you're going to be drawing on.

So here is a reference I have.

I have?

What?

Good.

I might.

So you're going to need a printout like this.

I have this on this eight and a half by 11.

The other thing you're going to need is tracing paper.

This is just regular old tracing paper.

See my hand through it?

And I got this from a craft store.

Any tracing paper should work, unless it's a particularly opaque tracing paper.

Other than that, you're going to need a drawing board, which I don't want to hoist off my easel, but it's a drawing board.

You just need some kind of surface to put these things on.

And beyond that, you'll need a pencil.

I have an HB art pencil here.

You could use a number two pencil, doesn't matter.

And I have a kneaded eraser.

I do think a kneaded eraser is better than other erasers because there is a point in this exercise where I kind of roll this over the drawing, and kneaded erasers are very good at that.

So that's all you're going to need to do this exercise.

And the idea here is to practice accuracy.

It's that first stage of the drawing, the first 20, 30, 40 minutes of the drawing.

So that's really how long these exercises should be.

And it's about getting those proportions right, those tilts right, and those shapes right, so that you can really set up your drawings each and every time for accuracy.

And that is so important throughout the whole process.

I don't need to tell you.

You know that experience of painting something and realizing the eye or the nose or whatever is in the wrong place, or the face is too wide.

And it's devastating, and you have to go back to the early stages and scrape down and redraw.

So it's much better if you get that drawing right from the outset, and this is an exercise designed to do just that.

So what we'll do, and we're going to do that in just a moment, and you'll see me unedited go through this entire exercise and very likely screw up, which I'm not going to hide from you.

I'll show it because I'm a little rusty right now when it comes to accuracy.

So let's see where I'm at.

But what we'll do is we'll take this tracing paper and we'll take this reference, we'll put the reference on the board, we'll put the tracing paper over top, tick off the top and bottom, and then put it next to the reference.

Then what we'll do is we'll set out to draw as accurately as we can, and then at the end of that, you put that tracing paper back over and you line up those first two points you put.

Don't do it before.

That would be cheating.

You wait till the end.

You really want to see how good or bad you did, and what kind of mistakes and trends are emerging with each one you do so you can figure out how to get better at those things.

And then you see how accurate you really were.

And again, I'm going to do this.

I'm not going to cut it.

We're going to put the tracing back over at the end.

I haven't done this in years, so I'm expecting catastrophe, but we'll see what happens.

And then what you can do is you can take this, repeat it as often as you like with any reference you want over and over and over and over again, and you will get better at drawing, and it's a way for you to check your own progress and be your own teacher so you can avoid going to an atelier or an academy forever.

No, I'm kidding.

They're great.

I went to them.

I went to two.

So I still think you should do that, but this is a way to get better at drawing right now on your own.

So let's get started.

So I just printed out a reference I had here, again, on 8.5 by 11, and I put it on the drawing board.

Here is just a regular sheet of Strathmore drawing paper, and I'll explain what that's about here in just a moment.

And over here, of course, we have our tracing paper.

And the tracing paper we're going to put here in just a moment, but the first thing we want to do is put it over our photo reference here for the first step of this exercise, and then

I'll clamp that back down, and we're going to get the HB pencil here, and I'm going to tick off the top right here, and I'm going to tick off the bottom here of the head just under the chin.

So you'll see I have a mark right there and a mark right there.

And you could do down here, but this is less clear, and I really want to focus on doing a portrait block-in, and that's really what this exercise is going to be.

So I'm doing the top and the bottom of the element I'm drawing, and then I'm going to remove the tracing paper, and I'm going to take this, and I'm going to put it right over here, and the reason, again, I have this paper underneath, this Strathmore drawing paper underneath is so that I can see my drawing more clearly.

If I had it against my drawing board, you'd see the wood color show through this tracing paper, and it would be harder to see my drawing.

So just having this sheet of paper here makes it easier for this exercise.

Okay, so our goal right now is to draw this as accurately as possible within that framework, and I'm going to be doing it the same size, and the idea is that the two marks here that were the top of the hair and the bottom of the chin are essentially going to represent the same location.

So my goal is to draw this as accurately as possible, and the eventual outcome here will be that we'll take this tracing paper, and we'll put it right back over this at the end, not during the course of the drawing, and we'll see how accurate we were, and in that way, you can give yourself your own critique, and you don't need to study with anyone except for me because I have special secret information that I only give my online students.

No, I'm kidding.

Getting critiques is useful, and there are so many great art teachers out there that you can work with, but this is a great way to specifically get better at drawing without necessarily having someone critique every single drawing and giving you a way to evaluate your progress.

So I'm going to start with the tilt at the top of the head here.

You can come over here and imagine that tilt like this.

If you were drawing from life, you could see your model in front of you, and in the same way, hover your pencil over your vision of them in the distance and compare that tilt, but here, of course, it's much more direct.

You can see that tilt right here, and I can see the chin here, so that hair is going to tilt under that chin right there like that, and then coming up here, we can sort of see the back of the hair has a tilt like this, that angle like this, and then we have this part of the hair like that.

Compare that tilt, this tilt here like this.

Then I can imagine roughly the height of the hair, just eyeball it in relationship to those overall heights.

I would say it's roughly right here.

It's going to change, I'm sure, to some degree or another, but it's just my loose sort of block-in.

There's that tilt here, this tilt here.

This tilt right here.

This tilt right here.

This tilt right here.

This tilt right here.

This tilt right there.

Okay, great.

Now, how far apart are these two things right here?

This tilt to where the eyebrow is not very far.

Now look at this tilt right here and sort of see this space.

Boom, boom.

Two things closely related.

Let's go here and look at that forehead.

I might be getting a little crowded there.

So let's back down right there.

Let's look at this tilt right here.

Let's play this tilt here against this tilt here, and then we can immediately look over at this tilt right there of the eyebrow right there.

Okay.

Tilt, tilt.

Keeping the shapes very simple.

You have 30 minutes.

You're not going to get very detailed.

What's the tilt of that nose?

You can hold your pencil up.

You can hold your pencil up.

Get used to trying to get the exact right tilt.

And then let's look at the tilt.

I'm looking at a tilt from here, the brow, to the inside of the nose there like this.

How does this tilt right here line up with those shadow shapes in that tilt right there?

How does this line up with that shadow shape right here?

Okay.

What is the tilt or angle between the nose and the corner of the mouth?

It's tilted out this way to where the corner would be right there.

What's the tilt between corner to corner?

It would be up like this.

What's the tilt from here to here?

So I'm kind of triangulating going from tilt, tilt, tilt, tilt.

So I'm sort of corroborating.

And then I can look here from the side of the nose and see that this tilt actually needs to be more wide like this.

And then from there, I can tilt up on that corner of the mouth like so.

Okay.

Finding that tilt, that angle between the ear and the corner of the mouth, you can see that the corner of the mouth is higher than the ear or that the ear ought to come down lower.

Again, remember that mark right there.

I'm going to make it a little bit heavier, this one a little bit heavier, so we don't forget where that is exactly.

Let's see where the neck lines up.

Lines up right with the corner of the eye or the tear duct right in there.

Let's see where this lines up just on the inside of the hair.

This neck was getting a little wide.

Let's see where this corner lines up on an angle right there with that chin.

So it should be down right about here.

Okay.

Now, something I like to do after I get this many shapes in is take my eraser and roll it over like this and lighten up those lines.

Now, remember, you want to make sure you don't lose those points that we originally started with, which was the whole purpose of this exercise.

And, you know, tracing paper is a little slippery here.

It's a little smudged, but that's okay.

These don't have to be pretty drawings.

So now let's go back through here and re-evaluate things.

Do I really think this distance?

I think the hair could come up a little bit.

I think that's part of the reason why my forehead was starting to feel a little bit too short there.

Let's look at this tilt here.

So I'm looking at things in a more granular way.

And you'll love it.

When I get to the end of this video, I'm going to show you a little bit more detail.

I'm going to show you a little bit more detail.

I'm going to show you a little bit more detail.

I'm going to show you a little bit more detail.

And you'll love it.

When I get to the end of this, I'm going to be horribly wrong because I need to do these exercises more now.

I used to be pretty good at them.

I still draw reasonably accurate.

But I think that when it comes to just raw accuracy,

I'm probably a little bit rusty right now.

And so I could definitely do more of these exercises.

And I am not going to hide that at all.

You're going to see me put this over this here momentarily.

And we'll just all be aghast at how horrifyingly bad I am.

But just because I'm terrible doesn't mean this exercise is bad and that you shouldn't do it.

You should do it and be better than me.

All right, so we're staying true to where this is right here.

Let's go and break this shadow down a little bit more.

So you can see I'm just kind of repeating my pattern, working my way back in here.

For longer drawings, I eventually work from the inside out.

But right now, we're targeting that initial accuracy.

That is the point of this exercise, is that accuracy of your initial shapes.