The Benefits of Drawing and Best Medium to Start With

Drawing is one of the most persuasive hobbies of people all around the world. But very few of those people are enthusiast learners who want to take it further.

Is drawing limited to attractive landscapes and art lessons?

Surely not! It’s a skill that can pillar multiple subject areas of school education and can also help later in your career.

Where can this drawing take you? What are the benefits of learning it?

Although you might have heard of a person who is a fine artist, Sculpturist, Painter, Graphic designer. But, here we are providing you with an insight into some different applications of drawing that can be wondrous for the masses.

We can use drawing as a precious tool for learning in school, improving the creative and mental power of one’s brain.

If you are one who truly enjoys drawings, then you should certainly take it further!

What is drawing?
Drawing is a visual art form created using lines or areas of tone by emphasizing the form or shape of an object as seen in reality, thoughts, concepts & fantasies.

In other terms, we can say a drawing is a 2-D artwork created using pencil, pen, charcoal, graphite, oil pastel, or other dry media. It’s highly governed by dry medium but can involve mediums like ink.

As drawing evolved it began to be distinguished from coloring & painting due to the idea that drawing gets absorbed or demolished by the complete work.

Drawing can be more than just fun & entertainment for people. There are various fields where drawing is being used or can be used as a useful tool to make things easier.

Most of us barely improve our drawing skills after we complete our compulsory art lessons in school days. For students & children, it’s nothing more than a boon.

Their studies can be highly leveraged with the help of it. Challenging them to explore things & ideas differently would also improve their learning.

It gives you the flexibility of place and time, you can do it anywhere at any time. Almost anyone can learn this as there are several benefits of drawing.

Benefits of drawing

1. Gives freedom to express

Drawing is a powerful tool for you to reach the masses with your personalized thoughts & ideas. It gives you the freedom to convey messages, express feelings and emotions without any barrier.

No matter you are a child, teenager, adult, or a retired individual, you can use drawing as a positive outlet to express yourself.

Suppressing your thoughts make you feel more entangled and depressed, that’s why it is very crucial to communicate your thoughts rather than suppressing them.

With the help of drawing, you get to talk to your inner self with more clarity to get a sense of satisfaction or fulfillment.

2. Boosts creativity & imagination

Drawing has been seen to boost creativity & imagination among people. Especially children can expand their personal boundaries via drawing.

It helps them to think creatively by crossing the real world’s hindrance. Thus, a child can draw anything they want; they have freedom of selection for testing their limits.

In research led by the National center of biotechnology information, it has been found that drawing enables us to think differently to develop problem-solving skills, produces new vistas and creative thoughts.

3. Gives joy and entertainment

Drawing can be easily leveraged for joy and entertainment. Several types of drawing like doodling, making cartoon illustrations are especially fun things.

For centuries we humans enjoys expressing ourselves with the visual form of art that includes sketches and drawings; now they are a great way of having fun.

While drawing, our brain releases certain chemicals that make us feel good. Even if you are not a top-class artist, the joy of drawing would enrich your life with relentless enjoyment and fun.

Drawing has no real world’s limitations, you can create distorted objects, fictitious characters, and doing all this would be nothing more than fun & entertainment.

4. Develops discipline and focus

In addition to fun, drawing develops discipline and focus to do things effortlessly. Your ability to remain focused has much influence on your excellence.

Joel Austin had once said, “What you keep before your eyes will affect you.”. This very line tells much about the influence of our environment on us.

Drawing requires a lot of concentration and patience. If you draw regularly, with the influence of drawing you become more system-oriented and self-disciplined.

Drawing brings out positive things, establishes focus and discipline in different areas of your life. Being disciplined is very challenging, but with the habit of drawing it becomes easier.

5. Helps reducing stress

It’s a well-known fact that sharing your feelings helps in reducing stress. Creating artworks – drawing, sketching, painting is an effective way to pull out anxiety & fear.

There are different ways in art through which you can lift yourself from real-world chaos. While drawing you need to look deep into the details of the environment, by doing so, you pull your mind from negative feelings and depressing thoughts and that’s similar to the experience of meditation.

A different kind of drawing called “spontaneous drawing” is also helpful in relaxing our brain from the strain of continuous concentration.

Rather than taking pills for stress and anxiety, engage yourself in something like drawings & paintings that can work as the antidote for your stress.

6. Boosts self-esteem and confidence

This is one of the most meaningful and rewarding things you obtain if you learn to draw.
Drawing comes with different levels of challenges that initially seem harder, but you overcome these hurdles with consistency and dedication.

Accomplishing these goals boosts your self-esteem and makes you more confident.
When you draw, you develop more unique & original thoughts.

These unique thoughts give you social identity & a feeling of pride. It has been seen in the past that artists devote themselves to demolish inequality and injustice in societies through their works, which can be either drawings or paintings; music or dramas.

Their work with unique perspectives has often been praised in society which boosts their morale and gives them a sense of attachment to the community.

7. Enhances understanding

The architect, scientists, researchers also employs drawing to understand things better. The human brain is wired for understanding things visually, with greater clarity.

Drawing is used in different disciplines of education. With drawings & sketches, it becomes easy to go into the details of an object or an idea.

Due to this reason our textbooks use drawing as a tool to explain things properly. Systematic drawings in the form of flow charts are very effective for understanding complex processes.

For children read & drawing activities have been seen to enhance logic and cognitive ability. Certain assumptions, such as addition, multiplication, subtraction, and textual differences can be easily made understood with their symbols.

So, we can say a sketchbook & marker would be more effective than a highlighter & notebook for these kids.

8. Helps in planning

Drawing & sketching can be used as tools for planning. It’s helpful in various fields ranging from science & business to fashion & sports.

Anything that’s created in the real world is first designed & planned with the help of diagrams and structural drawings. For comparing things & making schedules, drawing is highly taken into use.

Instead of creating lengthy notes and a plan of action, making quick sketches would be a better alternative.

Some, doctors before performing surgery have been known to plan the procedures with the help of sketches.

9. Increases memory power

It has been found in research that drawing can increase your recall power by nearly double. It’s superior to activities such as reading or writing.

Information processed visually, kinesthetically & semantically with the help of drawing remains in the brain for a longer time. A similar study mentioned in the tandfonline.com article also claims about the memorial benefits of drawing in younger and adults.

All these are because of the way our human brain understands and preserves memory. Drawing forces our brain to add pictures & a visual explanation to the meaning of a term or an event.

Information with attached pictures gets properly absorbed by our senses. These proper information builds strong neural connections and resists our brain to lose them easily.

10. Helps in career

What edge would you get, if you will improve your skills in art or drawing?

Well, you must have heard of someone becoming a fine artist, art technician, illustrator, or art gallery curator; all these are some amazing lines of work for those who choose art or drawing as their ultimate career.

Besides these, even if you don’t want to get directly involved in art or drawing. You can still take advantage of it.

It would give you an edge in all types of careers, also there is a range of art-related careers possible – Animator, photographer, art director, interior designer, fashion designer, graphic designer are some of them.

I could show you a hundred more related careers, but I’m pretty sure you get the point.

Even now, If none of the above-mentioned appeals to you, still art can help you in many ways to get the career of your choice, no matter it’s related to media, marketing, accounting, medicine, and even public relation.

Why Should we Appreciate art?

From making you creative to sharpening your memory drawing can help you boost your mind in many ways. Art and drawing have been with us for ages.

Before the development of language, humans recorded their lives and stories through art. It has all the secrets of human development hidden in them.

We must encourage the new generation to learn this skill for a better understanding of the past. Learning it can help them in taking references from those past events and experiences.

Teachers can integrate drawing in several ways to enrich the learnings of students. Appreciating art can help emotionally, financially & psychologically to shape their personality.

Many people believe that it’s a god-gifted talent, only for professionals and hobbyists, but that’s a myth, drawing is a learnable skill & can be helpful for almost everyone.

Like other skills, it can also be improved over time. Consistency is the key, training the drawing muscles every day can help you master the skill faster.

There’s no reason you should discount drawing. It’s a wonderful skill you can have.

So, where to start from? What media should you aim to learn first? These questions might be arousing in your head.

Well, there are plenty of media you can choose from. But as a beginner, you should start with something that strengthens your basic drawing skills like recognizing line, angle, perspective, proportions, constructing shadows, etc.

Pencil drawing can be the best media you can start with. Let’s move forward by knowing more about it.

What is a pencil drawing?
A form of drawing which generally uses graphite and color pencils as a medium is known as a pencil drawing. Whereas pencils are generally a wooden stick with an embedded graphite rod or color wax.

Why pencil drawing?

Pencils are used in writing, drawing, and sketching. It also gives you the freedom to undo your mistakes using an eraser.

Artist’s ability to draw is an important skill that determines their strength; before entering the creative world of art one should make it strong.

Understanding compositions like perspective, proportions, orientation & its rules are very necessary skills one needs to learn.

Starting with pencil-drawing can be very beneficial for you. It would help you to come across crucial elements of drawings.

Learning these basic skills would be very easy with a pencil; Since you must have drawn with it once.
Pencil drawing is a skill that introduced many artists to the world of art.

Certain pencil techniques like shading, smudging, hatching can take your drawing to the next stage.
Many famous people throughout the globe preferred to use pencils in their work.

Artists like Pablo Picasso, Jean Auguste, John Singer Sargent have used pencil in many of their works. Even today, many works of these artists are present in museums & galleries all around the world.

Pablo Picasso’s “playing Card and Package of Tobacco”; John Singer Sargent’s “Alice Meynell”; John Constable’s “Trees and a Stretch of Water on the Stour” are some of the famous examples.

History of pencil drawing

Painters & Draftsmen in Greek used to draw on papyrus using the metal stylus (usually made of lead). During the same era, people in England were started using graphite for marking sheep.

In Germany, people started making pencils with a mixture of graphite antimony & sulfur. Later it was being kept in wooden holders by Italians.

After many years, an American named Ebenezer wood mechanized the process of making a pencil. And it was Hymen Lipman, who attached rubber to it in 1858.

Despite all this, it’s Nicolas Jacques Condo who invented the modern-day pencil made up of graphite and clay. It was then people began to use pencils in works like writing, sketching, marking, drawing, etc.

What makes pencil drawing so unique? Well, many things help it stand out from all the other mediums- it’s beginner-friendly, easily accessible media fabricated with solid pigment (graphite or wax) that gives you better control over its values or shades.

Most of us are familiar with this medium since our childhood. It needs a very minimalistic approach to learn drawing basics with familiar media like pencil, that’s why it holds a significant position in the field of art.

Let’s check this awesome webstory on “10 reasons you should start drawing now“

Here are some advantages of learning pencil drawing

Benefits of drawing with pencil

• It’s a familiar media
  Most of us have used pencils from our childhood for writing kind of stuff. Drawing pencils are pretty similar to writing pencils. The movement of the hand is somehow different in drawing than writing, but despite that familiarity with medium helps you gain confidence.

• It helps you get out of your comfort zone.
  Learning different types of pencil techniques would help you experience the medium much closely. Understanding the basics clearly would give you the liberty to go beyond the rules & create something out of the box.

• It’s the best tool for planning
  Pencil can be practiced on almost any type of drawing surface. Hence, it serves as the best option for preliminary sketches. It helps you to quickly mirror your ideas onto paper for smooth planning. Many artists use it as a tool to see the basic form or structure of the object.

• It can be combined with other mediums.
  Pencils exclusively can create a variety of shades & effects. But having the freedom to add watercolor allows you to create a novel medium with its unique essence of texture and quality.

• It’s available in a variety of grades.
  Different grades of pencils are available in the markets making it easier for you to render values in an artwork. However, 3 to 4 grades are enough for all kinds of shades.

• It’s inexpensive & accessible
  It becomes very easy to start with the pencil as it’s available everywhere at a very low price. You can start pencil drawing with just basic materials. Behind the popularity of pencil drawing, accessibility is an important factor.

• It can be erased for making corrections.
  What is nice about a pencil is that something drawn with it can be easily removed with erasers. This unique trait of the pencil allows you to experiment a lot.

• It helps you learn to shade
  In pencil drawing, you get to learn shading techniques that play a significant role in reflecting the depth of a subject or showing its 3D nature. You can say shading takes your drawing to the next level by giving it realistic appeal.

That was my take on the importance of drawing and why you should start with pencil drawing?. I hope you might have got the inspiration to start your journey of drawing with a pencil.

Keep Drawing!

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