Drawing / painting is one of many electives you can choose at Elverum Folkehøgskule. We work with different techniques and materials, increase skills and have an independent project. Here are Drawing / Painting electives' best tips on how to increase your skills!

• Never compare your own work with that of others! You develop your own expression and everyone gets a different style. How good you think everyone else is is not relevant to your process and your development. Do you get a compliment? - Say thank you without explaining away or talking down your own work.
• Draw things you are not good at! Do you find it more difficult to draw a whole body than it is to draw a face / portrait? Then you should focus on the whole body! One way to practice is to draw a croquis with a very short time per sketch. This is a quick sketch method where you draw a model and have to get the whole body down on the sheet in the allotted time, for example 5 minutes, 3 minutes, 1 minute, 30 seconds and 15 seconds.
• To draw is to see - move your gaze from the sheet to your model or reference image often, preferably every 5-10 seconds. Often we draw from our own head or our own memory instead of analyzing and seeing what we are going to reproduce on paper. By moving your gaze often, you can reduce this gap.
• Practice skills with small exercises such as drawing with the wrong hand. This forces you to move your gaze more often than usual and you strengthen the connection between eyes - brain - hand motor skills.
• Set goals and set yourself a level of ambition that gives you a good balance between challenge and mastery.
• Notice your lines - do you draw many small and light or fewer and harder? Try the opposite of what you usually do from time to time.
• Draw with a light hand (weak) at the beginning and draw many lines. Erase the lines that go wrong, before drawing with harder pressure when you are happy with the shape.
• Find out and locate where the darkest and where the lightest is. Work with the transitions (also called denominations). Let the small and very bright spots remain completely white.
• Watch tutorials, follow known and unknown artists on social media, get inspired and share tips with others.

Below you can see examples from exercises where the students have drawn a blind contour with a continuous line.

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