haircut turnaround (Patreon)

One of the best exercise to very fast inscrease your drawing skill level is to draw an object you struggle with is a turn-around  exercise. It’s not only an animation, but its an exercise that forces you to use exactly this part of brain that is responsible for all drawing skills: seeing and understanding symmetry, perspective, feeling dimmentions, understanding lines and objects movement. When I did the haircut for this example, my brain almost melted like a yogurt and it’s because it’s very tiring exercise also and may be frustrating. But I promice you, once you take few objects on board and turn them around like that, you will start to understand how it works and in future you won’t have to learn how to place stuff in perspective because you will simply understand it.

There are a lot of drawing exercises, but how much of skill level increase do they give you? I made a list using percentage of what I think they really give:

Tracing - gives you  5% level increase. Not very much. It’s only lineart exercise, hand exercise; you don’t learn to draw. 

Redrawing from a reference -  20% - lineart work plus learning to imitate lines you see and place them on paper, learning to analyze bodyparts. You learn to draw but still think flat, redrawing from flat reference. 

Redrawing from real life - 30% - all above plus the fact that you are forced to place dimmentional object in a real perspective onto a flat piece of paper. 

Drawing from memory singular object - 70% - you force your brain to think dimmentional, analyze placement of the object and perspective, You start seeing object as an actual object, not a bunch of flat lines. You think with shape and treat object as a whole. That is why beginners never sketch before drawing because they cannot yet use a sketch as guide, because they only imittate flat lines. 

Drawing Turn-around from memory - 90% Very intense for the brain and tiring, very often also frustrating because you think you waste time for one short object rotation, and it's much much slower then copying from reference and less accurate. BUT. You teach your brain to understand movement. So everything from above: dimmentional thinking, analyzing perspective etc. plus understanding physics and motion. That is a skill of the most difficult drawing activity - ANIMATION. You can learn by heart how to draw a face or a hat.  But once you understand it, you will be able to draw any object you are asked of. Someone shows you a flat picture of a Giraffe front and side, you will be able to draw this animal in all angles. The  good artist is able to draw everything, not because they've learnt everything by heart but because they understand how it works.