Is it your dream to learn to draw in 2021 or to improve your drawing?

With our third lockdown just descended upon us, now might be just the time for you to take some time out for creativity and finally learn to draw, or to improve your drawing skills...

I've decided to offer 50% off the normal price of my Essential Drawing Skills course and my Confident Colour and Composition course for the duration of this lockdown to help those of you who need a creative outlet - have fun, get creative, and improve your skills!

Both courses are self-study - meaning you can download the PDF and any additional material, print it out if you want, and get creative at home away from the computer so that you can relax, enjoy yourself, and take it all entirely at your own pace...

I have lots of drawing resources right here that can help you...

• Free drawing lessons to get you started
• Full 'Start Drawing Your Way Essential Drawing Skills' self-study course (suitable for beginners or those with a little experience wanting to improve)
• 'Confident Colour & Composition' artist's self-study course (to help you improve colour and composition when creating artworks)

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Learn pencil drawing techniques and ideas to improve your drawing skills…

The graphite pencil is our basic drawing tool, so it’s well worth learning how to draw well with pencil.
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Whether you prefer to just draw with pencil for sketches and rough outlines, or if you love to create your finished artwork completely in pencil, there are different pencil drawing techniques that can help you.
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How to use being mindful in nature to collect meaningful and personal inspiration for your expressive art drawings…

Taking time out for art, being mindful in nature, and bringing that back to our creativity…

It's been back to school for me this autumn - I'm currently just over halfway through Victoria Johnson's wonderful Create Collections class - and I'm enjoying taking a new look at colour and creating my artworks and designs with a collection in mind...

Here's some of what I've been up to so far, with more to come!
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Learn how to easily measure drawing angles and proportions to help develop your drawing skills...

My best drawing techniques for beginner drawing and drawing from life - step-by-step guidance - follow along with me as we learn to draw together...

In this earlier blog post, we looked for simple shapes in our drawing to get us started. This is a fantastic drawing technique that you can use when you’re drawing absolutely anything…

But not everything we want to draw is as simple as a single leaf and sometimes we need to use additional techniques to help us draw more complex things.

We’ll start looking at these here…

Have you ever seen artists holding a pen or pencil up at arm’s length when they’re drawing something?

Why keep an art sketchbook?

Whether you’re feeling inspired to draw, draw, draw… or have been told to start a sketchbook habit, here we take a look at some reasons why you might keep a sketchbook and think about what format that sketchbook might take…

Your sketchbook is there to serve you so use it in the way that’s most useful for you personally!

How do you feel about the idea of keeping a sketchbook?

Is it something you’re keen to get started doing? Or do you feel you ‘should’ keep an art sketchbook?

Perhaps you searched online for sketchbook ideas and now feel intimidated by the perfectly-coiffured sketchbook pages gracing Instagram and Pinterest?

Yep! Me too!

Exploring self-expression in art and creating meaningful drawings…

​​The objective of this particular drawing lesson is to understand that art is expressive and personal…

…and NOT an exercise in technical drawing.

So that you will feel confident that, actually, you ARE an artist.

Basic colour wheel colour theory explained – keeping it simple – put the ideas into practice straight away.

Do people keep referring to the colour wheel or colour theory without explaining what it is, why it’s helpful, or what it’s got to do with you? …confusing, right?

Only until it’s explained properly! When you understand basic colour wheel ideas, it’s like you’ve been let into a special artists’ club and get to find out all the colour secrets!

I didn’t properly understand about the artist’s colour wheel until I started training in interior design… it was a big ‘a-ha’ moment and suddenly everything ‘clicked’…

That’s what I want to share with you – how basic colour wheel colour theory can improve your art!

We’ll look together at the basic colour wheel – we’ll understand what it’s for and understand some simple colour terms before going on to see how basic colour wheel colour theory can help us choose colours for our drawings and artworks.

In this blog post, we’ll cover:

• Understanding the colour wheel
• Understanding ‘warm’ and ‘cool’ colours and why they’re important
• Using the colour wheel
• How colour mixing works
• Mixing colours for drawing

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Exploring drawing and painting on fabric - inspired by the beautiful blendings of colours that watercolour artists create, I decided to explore the effects of ink on wet fabric....
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A small handful have become artworks in their own right, whereas others become part of a pattern, or composite artwork, combined with my drawings, and many are just a very faint background, you would hardly notice.

​This is actually a technique I use in very many of my digital artworks to create an interesting, colourful and textured background for my artwork...