Timed Sketch Videos (A free 7-day course)

Timed Sketch Videos are the best tool for rapidly improving your sketching and drawing skills. There are seven of them here. Work through one a day and improve your skills dramatically!

  • In order to sketch and draw anything well, one must learn to see the shapes, contours, lines and values in the subject, and how they relate to one another positionally.
  • Timed Sketching forces one to see this way quickly.
  • Expect your 1-minute sketches to be very rough. That’s okay! Don’t be critical of yourself. You’re learning!
  • The 2-minute sketches will be a bit better. Likewise for the 3 and 4 minute sketches as you can observe more carefully and be a bit more accurate with your line placements and shape locations.
  • In the 10-minute sketch, you should still sketch quickly, but with more care and decisiveness in your observations and line making.

That’s the way the videos work. Quick and sloppy leads to quick and a little more careful, which leads to considerably more careful and decisive. Your brain remembers all this and adjusts your hand/eye coordination more and more with each 50-minute session. It also learns to be quick and decisive!

Friend, If you commit to working through each video over the next 5-7 days, you will be astonished at how quickly you can sketch anything compared to your first attempt! It just works! And it’s great fun! You’re going to become really good at sketching and drawing.

What You Need…

  • I suggest you sketch on a large, inexpensive newsprint sketch pad at least 11”x14” so you can keep moving from sketch to sketch without pausing the video. They are acid free these days and cheap. Your sketches will last and not yellow. SAVE YOUR SKETCHES!
  • Sharpen up half a dozen good pencils so you won’t have to constantly stop to sharpen. Keep the sharpener handy though.😉 Standard yellow school pencils, “No.2”, will work or you can buy some “B” hardness artists pencils for a bit darker line and greater range of darks and lights. Don’t buy a set of different hardness pencils. Not necessary!
  • Hold your pencil about halfway up from the point, ease your pressure for light lines and sketch with gestural, sketchy lines. Imprecision is to be expected. Simply restate a line if you want to refine a shape. Darken up lines you’re happy with. All those sketchy “mistakes” end up becoming an attractive part of the whole. Trust yourself!
  • Email Your Video Sketches to me. I would love to see them!

You can’t do sketches enough. Sketch everything and keep your curiosity fresh.

-John Singer Sargent

Here Are The Videos…