How to: The advantage of drawing fast.

 This is my first how to draw post. There are a great deal of advantages to being able to draw fast.  One obvious one is when you are sketching people in public.  People in public don't often stand still in one pose and if they did it would be boring poses. In order to capture moving people you have to be able to draw fast.

But  more than that the best way to learn to draw is by  doing a lot of fast drawings.  I  have figured out that when I was at the Art Student's league I did at least 20,000 one minute drawings it is hard not to get better if you do that many drawings.  If you learn how to draw fast you will fine it much easier to draw when you do have the luxury of more time. If you only know how draw slowly you will have a much harder time of drawing when you don't have the time.

These were 1 minute drawings the top middle one was worked on after the pose.

You should approach a drawing that you know you have a  lot of time  to complete the same way you approach a drawing in which you have very little time. Start with a light sketch and then work it up to a more completed and accurate drawing going from large masses to smaller ones working all over. There are of course many other ways of working, but this way has several advantages. As you can see in the above drawing with the one minute poses complete one can work on the shading and detail after the model stops posing. However, if you say start with the head and work down, when the pose changes you have no where to go.  Another advantage is that working quickly breaths life into a drawing, see my post on Frans Hals for more on the breath of life in paintings. Another advantage is that even if you don't have time to finish your drawing the viewer still has an outline to look at.

Ok so how do you learn to draw fast.  Practice, practice, practice.  As I wrote above I've done at least 20,000 one minute drawings, you have to practice, try to find a sketch class near you where they do a lot of one minute drawings. Unfortunately unless you live in a big city this can be hard to do;  many people who go to sketch classes like longer poses, and think of short poses only as warm up.  So you might have to talk them into doing short poses.  At any rate always carry a sketch pad with you and sketch as many differant people as you can.

Next up I will tell you the one secret of learning to draw.