Drawing Techniques: Mental Practice.

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The drawing techniques I want to go over today have to do with the mind.

People have used mental practice for sports, but I bet that not many have used it for art. Why not? I mean, you think of ideas for drawings or paintings with your mind, so why not use your mind to improve your abilities? I'll show you how I do it.

I'll be covering plenty of "physical" drawing techniques in other articles. I want this one to be a bit different.

There are basically two sections here, "mental practice" and "mental awareness." They are both important. So, let's get started with the drawing techniques.

Mental Practice

Mental practice deals with improving your artistic abilities with your mind. Basically, you imagine yourself doing art with as much detail as you can. Close your eyes and picture yourself drawing. You can focus on your hand, make the pencil float, or forget the pencil completely and just think about the lines being made.

Start with a blank sheet of paper in your mind (or canvas if you want to do painting). Pick a subject and start rendering it mentally. You won't be able to get very far before your mind wanders off. You don't have to start over if your mind does lose focus. The more you can picture on the page the better.

Picture yourself making lines and strokes, doing shading, measuring, anything. Think about style as well. Are you doing realism or loose strokes? Think about how dark the strokes are. Consider also figures and anatomy, proportions, and whatever else troubles you.

How long you do it is up to you. I like to do it when I am either relaxing or lying in bed. Do it for a few minutes, or maybe just a few seconds. Do it until your mind gets "bored" and you can't concentrate. Do this often, and you will be surprised how differently you see things when you start drawing again.

Mental Awareness

The second aspect of mind training is awareness. In a minute, I'll show you how to combine the techniques. With mental awareness, you look at objects you see everyday, but from an analytical perspective. In other words, when you're walking down the street and you see a tree, look at how the light is hitting the leaves, the overall geometric shapes that are being formed, the patterns of leaves, the angles, the colors, all of that.

What we are doing here is programming our minds to "see" as we try to see when doing art. The goal is to get your mind thinking as an artist all the time. It will get easier and easier for you to see when drawing if you are in the habit of doing it all the time.

Take a mental snapshot of what you see. Are the colors warm or cool? The more things you can see, the better. When your mind gets used to seeing things and studying them quickly, you will start getting better at art without even having to practice!

Let's combine the two.

When you are looking at things in person and studying them as we just mentioned, imagine yourself trying to draw them. What kind of lines would you be making? How would you do the perspective? Where would your main shadows be? Go through the process of doing a drawing or painting mentally while looking at various things. You don't have to have a sketchbook. That's the cool part of this. You can practice anytime, anywhere quickly and easily.

When looking at a landscape, think about how you would create certain effects. Like, how you would render an object with as little detail as possible or show the difference between two similar things.

Keep practicing. It'll get easier. In fact, it will become a habit after a while. Do it while standing in line waiting, while taking a break, anywhere you feel like it, or at least anywhere that you see something of interest. It can be done for just a few seconds at a time if you wish. Think of it as a "quick sketch."

These mental drawing techniques will help improve your art. Remember that art relies heavily on creativity. The strong your mind is, the better.

More on the mind.

I like studying the power of the mind. I've seen some pretty interesting things. An artist needs a good imagination no matter what you do. Luckily, you can develop your mind and improve it. Your mental images will get clearer and clearer and improve your drawing techniques.

If I had to recommend one course for you to really improve your mind, I would say that the Silva Life System is worth checking out. I'm not going to go into detail here, but you can read the website and learn about it if you like. It deals with getting more in touch with your mind for greater creativity, intuition, and I think you'll like the health benefits as well. I'm a big fan of the course.

Check out the rest of my articles for more drawing techniques.

More drawing techniques.

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