I saw a little mini-course on Instagram, by the Artist Jen Brandon, which focused on timed sketches to accelerate one’s skills over the course of 7 days. One of the unique things about the course is the way the reference photos are presented. Rather than saving them to your device, opening one, setting a stop watch and repeating the process for each photo, Jen put the all in a video with the images swapping out after the time limit is reached. All you have to do is watch the video and sketch. The next image automatically loads when the time is up on the current one. Perfect! No interruptions to your workflow during the exercise!

The course runs 7 days with different timed sketch exercises for each day. These are fast sketches and I can tell you from experience they will greatly reinforce your seeing and capturing of only what matters. And that will spill over into all your work, timed or not. In other words, you will become faster and more accurate at putting your marks to paper. Of course, you must show up each day and DO the exercises. Fortunately, you’ll only spend maybe an hour in each session. Then you take pics and share them with others taking the course on Jen’s Facebook group. This is a good thing because you can comment and interact with the other artists, giving and receiving encouragement to keep at it for the duration of the course.

Just to clarify a bit, I went at each of these as if they were 1-minute sketches. If I finished before the time limit, I embellished a bit or tweaked a line or two. No erasing though!

The course is $37 and I don’t get anything for mentioning it. I just think it’s a great little way to accelerate one’s learning for the price of a few days of Starbuck’s coffee visits.😉

Here’s a link to check it out and learn all about why one would want to take the course.