By Artists & Illustrators | Tue 25th May 2021
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Establishing a daily ritual of drawing can often help when you’re lacking motivation, as Felicity House explains
A lack of motivation to make art is familiar to many of us, especially when worrying thoughts fill our mind. A way forward I found helpful was to establish a 15 minute-a-day routine of drawing, setting myself a particular time to do this every day.
Regular drawing practice improves our observation and drawing skills and, even when you are busy, 15 minutes is an achievable amount of time to set aside.
4 ways to kick-start your motivation
1. Start with a fresh new sketchbook. So many different drawing tools are available, but I recommend reacquainting yourself with a pencil. There is something very calming about pencil drawing, it’s easy to forget how good soft graphite feels on paper – a 2B or 4B would be great.
Read more: best pencils for sketching
2. Draw something small, simple, and to hand. It should also be something you like – a leaf or two on a plant, half a tomato, a shell, a sofa cushion. There’s no need to be too ambitious. You might draw a family member watching TV. A pet is another great subject. If he or she moves a lot, make several small drawings on one sketchbook page within the 15 minutes.
3. Begin lightly, making marks as you see them. Draw over these softer lines with harder marks to correct or improve the drawing. Build up tones using a series of close marks.
4. Set a timer and always stop after 15 minutes. Get used to what can be achieved in that time. As you begin to draw faster and more accurately, a confidence and fluency develops. Stay with pencil for as long as you like before moving onto another drawing tool, such as a biro, a conté pencil or a fineliner pen. Keep it up, 15 minutes every day; the habit quickly establishes and becomes a part of the day you can’t be without.
Read more: How to draw with pen
How to progress your daily drawing routine
Having established a regular warm-up drawing routine, add into the day a quick, hour-long painting in pastels, oil paints, gouache or watercolour. When choosing a still life subject, I often use a simple formula of three particular things:
- Firstly, choose a “surface”. It might be an interesting piece of fabric, a piece of attractive wrapping paper, or a familiar tablecloth.
- Next choose a container – a favourite cup or mug, perhaps, or an interesting jug, basket or patterned bowl.
- Finally choose what I call a “natural” object, such as a fruit or vegetable, a shell or a seed pod, maybe some feathers or flowers. In selecting each of the three objects, I’m always looking for shapes and patterns that work well together, as well as colours that either contrast or harmonise.
Set things up by placing the surface on a table, the container on the surface, and the natural object in or around the container. Move the components around until you notice a grouping you like enough to paint. Looking through a viewfinder helps a great deal here – even just looking through a makeshift rectangle made from your thumbs and forefingers allows the eye to finalise a composition. Seeing through a frame helps you to choose a more interesting composition which may be off-centre or involve items being cropped.
Next use the viewfinder to roughly plot your chosen composition on the support. Rest the viewfinder and paint the composition you plotted. I like to use soft chalk pastels, often with tonal watercolour washes for an underpainting on a support that is generally no more than 20x25cm. If I use oil paints, I go smaller still.
EXAMPLE: How to draw a breakfast still life
In time, you can use the above formula to tackle more complex still life with growing confidence. Our homes are full of things we’ve liked and bought, been given or kept as a memory. With some forward planning our daily food preparations can be paused to provide other lovely subjects.
I’m particularly fond of domestic interiors so being at home provides me with time to give a whole day to work on something more ambitious, like a kitchen view or a dining table. There is a fascination about arrangements of objects collected in this way. The challenge of relating one item to another makes for an absorbing day’s work.
Here’s a six-step guide to painting a breakfast still life in pastel.
Step 1
Use white Colourfix card as a support as it accepts water and also has a tooth for pastel. Apply a light blue watercolour wash to the whole surface and then indicate the main masses with a mix of Indigo and Alizarin Crimson watercolours.
Step 2
Strengthen dark areas with stronger washes and define the shadows and smaller shapes, such as the cutlery and labels on jars. The underpainting gives cohesion and establishes darks, which are sometimes difficult to make with pastels alone.
Step 3
Sharpen up some of the drawn edges on cutlery and crockery with pastel pencils. Make a first indication of the striped pattern of the tablecloth. Let the underpainting dry.
Step 4
Add the first blocks of colour using the sides of your pastel sticks. Aim for a palette that contrasts the cool blues with complementary warm oranges and browns.
Step 5
Build up colour gradually with pastels. Pay careful attention to tonal values, which help define individual objects. Flat surfaces of milk and tea can be achieved by rubbing the pastel with your finger.
Step 6
Finish by refining details, adding the reflections to liquids and highlights on cutlery. Use the shadows to link the separate items and provide a rhythm to the composition. Leave a contrast between smooth blended areas and raw mark-making textures elsewhere.
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