After making it a goal to improve my drawing I wondered how much work I would need to put in to make it happen.
How often do you need to draw to get better? Drawing for about 1 hour a day will improve your drawing. The key is consistency so 20 minutes to 2 hours as a daily routine will yield improvement as well. One hour is the sweet spot for beginner to intermediate artists to complete more drawings. Twenty minutes may only allow for simple sketches while 2 hours may give diminishing returns with a focus on details.
People who are seeking to get started drawing or artists looking to improve may be frustrated or lost trying to improve. Here I will cover how often you need to draw to get better, what you need to learn, and routines to do so.
How Often Do You Need to Practice Drawing
Drawing for an hour a day will improve your drawing. You can draw less or more, but you have to make it a daily routine in order to keep improving.
The total time it may take you to learn to draw is about ~8 weeks. I go into more depth on that timeline in this post here.
It will help to keep a daily reminder along with a goal at the beginning to keep you on track. Checking it off will help motivate you as you tally your past sessions and give you the data so you know you’re on your way.
What exactly are you going to draw that day? This sets a clear objective for yourself so you can achieve progress that is concrete and you can point to as experience.
Failure to meet the goal is also a great way to improve because now you have a basis on which to set your expectations.
An example could be that your goal was drawing 4 people but you could only draw 2. Now you know your capabilities and you can set the goal for next week to try and draw 3 people.
You can start off drawing less like 20 minutes then gradually work your way up to an hour to improve.
With an hour you have time to do some quick exercises as well as complete small drawings.
Quick exercises can be used to warm up and improve techniques including
- Linework
- Shapes
- Shading
Now that you’ve warmed up you can use the rest of your time to complete an actual drawing. As these will be daily you may benefit from setting weekly/monthly themes or areas you’d like to focus on.
For example for one week you could draw:
- Hands
- Faces
- Eyes
- Objects (Still Life)
- Plants
- Animals
- Peoples
- Landscapes
All of these are just some examples and each of them can even be broken down into their own weeks to focus on as daily exercises.
If you’d like you could break them down to focus on specific techniques instead of genres:
- Lines/Strokes
- Shapes/Forms
- Shading/Lighting
- Perspectives/Angles
- Color
As you can see we can break it down all these different ways into exercises you could definitely complete in an hour. Limiting it to an hour forces you to focus as you don’t have time to waste but doesn’t rush you.
Two hours or more is something you can push yourself to after that depending on your goals and start producing more significant results with complete detailed drawings.
What Should You Draw to Get Better
To get better at drawing something you need to fix whatever is holding your drawing back first. If you’re brand new to drawing something you may simply need more repetition and practice. Identify the problems and flaws in your drawings and if you are still stuck, work on learning techniques to correct them.
In order to get better at drawing something the initial thought we might come to is to draw more of that thing.
Unfortunately, a lot of the time, especially as beginners, we find this doesn’t do much to fix the problem and become frustrated.
Experience and practice are definitely needed to learn and improve drawing as a skill, however, that is only part of what you need.
Knowledge and techniques are also needed to improve your drawing.
If all you needed was some repetition then good for you, go draw and get those reps!
If you’re stuck still trying to figure it out, take a step back from drawing and observe your work. Identify the specific things that don’t look right or make your drawings look bad to you.
If you can’t quite put your finger on it try taking a break from looking at your own work and look at works from artists you like.
If you’re trying to emulate someone’s work or are using a reference look at that. Find the differences between their drawings and yours, identify the good and bad.
Chances are you’ve now identified the problem(s) so now you have to fix them.
Now that you know what the mistake is you must research, study, and learn. Perform exercises using the new knowledge you’ve gained so you can implement it in your own drawings.
Combine the new knowledge with experience by using repetitive and iterative exercises. So you implement what you learn and then study the new drawings.
Find the errors or mistakes and correct them in the next drawing. Repeat this process and you will maximize how much better you get at drawing!
Drawing Practice Exercise Routines to Improve Your Drawing
Before doing any actual drawing you need to set your goals as part of your routine.
I discussed breaking your goal to improve into monthly or weekly themes or goals however to maximize improvement you need to break those down into the daily goals.
Once you set your daily goal you are ready to draw.
Start with 15-20 minutes a day to get yourself accustomed and make it an easier habit.
Do some simple sketching or pick simple things to improve or practice including line work, shapes, shading, and deconstructing forms.
Move onto 30-45 min when you’re ready to give yourself time to flesh out some sketches.
Now you can do a quick warmup and fit in a small drawing or work on multiple sketches.
One hour is the tipping point where you can do a nice full warm-up going over all your techniques for about 15-20 minutes leaving you 40-45 minutes for the actual drawing.
The drawing can focus on whatever area you are looking to improve on.
To improve your drawing as a whole you can use the method I introduced earlier with weekly or monthly themes targeting specific areas.
Even though it is 40-45 minutes you can fully devote that entire time to one exercise without overdoing it regularly.
Specific Exercises You Can Do to Improve Your Drawing:
Note: For some of these I give numbers of how many drawings to do, you can try to hit these numbers but as I’ve repeated multiple times depending on what you’d like to focus on this number can change.
If you want to focus on details like shading, lines, and measuring vs overall forms, gestures, and perspectives you might do less or more. Try out these numbers in your 40-45 minutes and change as needed but don’t slack off!
- Drawing several hands (4-8) at different angles to practice drawing hands.
- Shading drawings of simple 3d objects with one light source to practice lighting.
- Deconstructing and creating forms of people with detail to measuring and proportion rather than detail.
- 3-4 iterative drawing of the same portrait repeatedly studying each drawing and correcting it in the next attempt.
- Draw the same object from 4-6 different angles to work on perspective.
- Life Drawing: Go out and draw one scene or people from real life.
- Draw 6-8 faces of the same person or character with different emotions.
These are just some examples of what you can do but whatever it is devote one hour a day and I guarantee you will improve. Good luck!
