You don’t need to know how to draw to paint.

Let’s face it, when you know how to draw, you waste a lot less time, and that’s a huge help. When I say you don’t need to know how to draw, I mean you don’t need to know how to draw everything in absolute detail!

There are lots of drawing tutorials on youtube and they’re all excellent if you want to be a drawer, special mention for drawabox! But what can I learn from all these online drawing courses that I could use in my paintings?

I mainly paint people, I hate to say I’m a figurative painter, this obsession with systematically finding a box for everything annoys me.

So, anyway.

The first thing that helps me with my paintings is daily training in quick 30-second sessions on the excellent website the line of action. You don’t think about it, you go for what’s essential with the urgency of time, you try to be as fluid as possible, to be ample, without thinking about body parts, in other words, you draw shapes!

For example, I don’t draw a hand, but squares, rectangles, cylinders – it’s less frightening than telling myself I have to draw a thumb, the palm of my hand, nails, fingers!

I do quick drawing sessions lasting 3 to 5 minutes. No more than that. The aim is not to do hour-long sessions, but to repeat every day to train my muscle memory. I think of it as stretching before sport. Yes, you stretch your muscles after sport, but before too!

The second thing is to learn how to place the light, decide where to place the shadows, and maintain coherence with adjacent subjects. For this, you don’t need any tutorials, you can look at your latest photos on your phone, or look at a piece of fruit on the table, or look at yourself in the mirror, how are you Narcissus?

The last and most important thing, even before you know how to put pencil to paper, is composition. Deciding on a strong composition beforehand, where I want to direct the viewer’s eye, where the focus of my drawing is. I recommend Ian Roberts’ YouTube channel.

To tell the truth, if I had to remember just one thing, it would be composition.

Composition is design, everything is design.