Review: 10 Essential Techniques for Better Drawing by Patricia Watwood (Craftsy Course)

10 Essential Techniques for Better Drawing is a beginner's drawing course that teaches techniques to help you improve your drawing skills.

It's a 148-minute video tutorial course on Craftsy.com. The instructor is Patricia Watwood who's trained in classic art. So the course has some elements on classic art.

To sum it up, it's a course that will teach you observational drawing skills so that you can draw your subjects with light and shadow in a convincingly manner to convey form. There's going to be a lot of shading.

Here are the ten lessons included:

• Introduction (2 min)
• Introduction to Black & White Media (22 min)
• Line & Contour (17 min)
• Structural Drawing (13 min)
• Enveloping & Triangulation (18 min)
• Transferring (13 min)
• Value (20 min)
• Form (19 min)
• Working on a Toned Ground (14 min)
• Color Media (10 min)

The whole course uses dry media such as the pencil and charcoal.

It's a comfortably paced course that starts with understanding line and contour, the basic tools you need to convey to your audience what you've drawn.

The next few lessons cover composition, proportion and blocking in. Basically, it's about thinking of how you should place your subject on the paper to have a pleasing image, and to make sure that problems don't happen in the early stage, such as running out of space or drawing too small. These are invaluable techniques for handling complicated scenes. By just drawing a few boundary lines, she's able to then place all the other subjects effortlessly at all the correct places. Patricia makes it looks easy when tackling composition and blocking in.

For those who like to work big, there's a short lesson on how you can transfer small drawings onto a big canvas.

The other important lessons are the ones that cover value and form. These lessons teaches you how to draw objects in light and shadow so that they will look real and have weight.

The last lessons introduces you to other dry media such as the coloured pencil and crayon. It's a bit too short to be effective. It just tells you that there are these media available so go out and try them.

Overall, the instructions are clear and the lessons are easy to follow along. You just need basic tools just the pencil or charcoal pencil to get started. There are many useful tips and techniques explored and explained in detail. The demonstrations are done in stages so you can see clearly the progression.

If you want to draw subjects in light and shadow from life, that's what you'll learn here.

It's a good starter course for beginners. And this course is also the foundation for her other course Figure Drawing: An Essential Guide (free).

The official price for the course is USD $29.99 but it's often sold at $19.99.

Check out more reviews for 10 Essential Techniques for Better Drawing on Craftsy today. Over 5,000 students have enrolled.

Disclosure: This course was provided to me by Craftsy for review purposes. You can support Parka Blogs by using the affiliate links as I get a little commission from each sale. :-)