Timed drawing practice - drills and pose references

Ten modes - five technique drills and five sets of timed poses we drew ourselves. A timer, something to copy, and, unlike every other practice tool, an answer to the question of what you should be working on, taken from what we measured in your last drawing rather than asked of you.

Line control

Long, committed strokes instead of short hesitant ones. This is the single most visible difference between a beginner drawing and a confident one.
Ellipses

Wheels, cups, plates, bottles, eyes and hats are all the same problem. Get ellipses right and a whole category of drawing stops being hard.
Shapes and boxes

Boxes are the foundation of everything man-made. A phone, a table, a building and a room are one problem at four sizes.
Proportion

Judging halves, thirds and relative sizes by eye. This is the skill people mistake for talent.
Values and shading

Light and dark are what make a drawing look solid. Outlines alone always look flat.
Gesture

Thirty seconds a pose, and the only thing you are trying to capture is the line of action. The fastest way there is to be physically unable to fuss.
Figure

Longer holds, real construction. Two minutes to five, with the masses and the proportions rather than the silhouette.
Hands

The subject people name when they say they cannot draw. It is not complexity - it is that you know too much about hands.
Faces

Head angles, one at a time. Almost every error on a face is a proportion you did not measure, and this is where you measure them.
Animals

Two masses and a spine. Every quadruped on earth is that, and the fur you were worried about is not the problem.

Why a timer helps more than talent does

A thirty-second limit is the best anti-perfectionism device ever built for drawing: you physically cannot fuss over a line you only have thirty seconds to make. That is the entire reason gesture practice works, and it is why the timer is not optional here.

Perfectionism is not a character flaw in a beginner, it is a rational response to bad feedback. If you cannot tell which of your marks is the problem, going slowly and carefully everywhere is the only strategy available. A timer removes that option and forces you to find out what your hand does when it is not allowed to hedge - which is nearly always better than what it does when it is.

The other practice sites stop at the timer. They hand you a clock and a photograph and ask what you want to work on, which is a question a beginner cannot answer, because knowing that your problem is measurement rather than talent is itself the teaching. We pick the drill from what we measured in your last few drawings.

What to practise when you do not know what to practise

There are five things we measure about a drawing, and each one has a drill attached to it. That mapping is the whole answer to this question, so here it is in full.

Line confidence is whether your strokes are smooth and committed or hesitant and hairy, and it is trained by the line control drill. Placement is whether a mark lands where you aimed it, which the ellipse drill trains harder than anything else. Corners and joins - whether shapes actually close - is the shapes and boxes drill.

Proportion is whether the parts of a drawing agree with each other, and the proportion drill trains the comparison habit that fixes it. Value range is whether there is a real difference between your lightest and darkest marks or everything sits in the same grey, and that is the values drill.

The five pose modes - gesture, figure, hands, faces and animals - sit alongside those five drills rather than replacing them. A drill trains one mechanical thing in the abstract; a pose applies it to something alive, on a clock. Warm up with a drill, then spend the session on poses.

If you have not had anything measured yet, start with line control. It is the dimension that changes fastest, it is visible in every other drawing you make, and five minutes of it before a lesson genuinely changes how the next twenty minutes look.

How long a session should be

Sixty seconds is a warm-up, and its job is not improvement - it is to get the first bad line of the day out of the way somewhere that does not matter. Do it immediately before a lesson rather than as a session of its own.

Five minutes is the real session, and it is long enough for the correction to start happening inside the session rather than between sessions. This is the default and the one to use on most days.

Ten minutes is about the most that is useful in one sitting on any single drill. Past that the returns fall off sharply, and the same ten minutes tomorrow is worth more than a second ten today - motor consolidation happens between practice sessions, not during them.

Another method entirely: fractional drawing

Everything above trains skills in isolation. The fractional method is a different road to drawing what you see: cover the reference except one tiny part, draw only that fragment, then reveal and draw the next, until the parts have become the whole. Nobody freezes in front of one square inch - it is the method for the day the whole subject feels like too much.

Two L-shaped scraps of paper over any photo make the window. It pairs naturally with the photo tool, which is the same idea automated - the full write-up is on that page.

The fractional method, and drawing from photos

Practising on paper

All five drills work on paper and always have. Set a timer, look at the reference on the screen, and draw on the page in front of you - the drill does not care which surface the mark lands on.

If you want the result measured, photograph the page with your phone and upload it. The same five dimensions are scored from a photo of paper as from a drawing made on the canvas, with one exception: paper reports no pressure, so pressure-derived detail is left unmeasured rather than scored as zero.

Which lessons each drill helps with

Drills are not an alternative to drawing things - they are the five minutes you spend so that the next forty go better. Here is where each one pays off first.

Ellipses are the whole difficulty of the mug and half the difficulty of the ice cream cone. Boxes are the book, and after that the house. Proportion decides whether the dog looks like a dog or a bear, and whether the face looks like a person or an alien. Value is the apple, the rose and the nose, in that order of difficulty.

How to draw a mug · How to draw a book · How to draw a dog · How to draw a face · How to draw an apple · How to draw a rose · How to draw a nose

Questions about practice

How often should I practise?: Every day you draw, for five minutes, before you draw. Practice is a warm-up rather than a separate discipline, and treating it as its own project is how people end up doing drills instead of drawings.
Is ten minutes a day really enough?: For a beginner, yes, and it beats an hour on Sunday. The consolidation that turns a movement into a habit happens between sessions, so the number of days matters more than the minutes per day.
Do I need to warm up before every drawing?: Not strictly, but sixty seconds of line control makes the first ten minutes of any drawing noticeably better. The first few lines of a session are always the worst ones - a warm-up just means they land somewhere that does not matter.
What if my drill score does not improve?: Scores move in steps rather than smoothly, and a flat fortnight is normal. If it is genuinely flat for longer, switch drills - the dimension you are stuck on is often not the one you think, and the feedback page will say which is actually lowest.
Can I practise on paper?: Yes. Use the on-screen reference and the timer, draw on paper, and photograph it afterwards if you want it measured. Nothing about the drills assumes a screen.
Where do the pose references come from?: We drew them. They are mannequins rather than photographs, which is deliberate on two counts: nothing here is licensed, attributed or withdrawable, and a photograph of a person contains their clothes and the lighting as well, which is exactly what a beginner cannot yet filter out.