Drawing Tutorial: Exercises to Boost Your Creativity

Learn three fun and easy drawing exercises to improve your creative thinking, from visual thinking agency Scriberia

You’ve probably tried a few writing exercises to generate new ideas, but have you ever thought of drawing instead? You don’t have to be a great artist, or even a mediocre sketcher to have a go. This isn’t about producing perfect pieces of art worthy of hanging on your wall. It’s about getting over the fear of the blank page and allowing your creative juices to flow through a more visual approach.

Dan Porter and Chris Wilson are the creative brains behind Scriberia, the Visual Thinking Agency that helps people think, work, and communicate through the power of pictures. Founded over ten years ago, Chris and Dan’s agency has worked with clients including Twitter, Adidas, the UN, and the Red Cross, helping them to think and communicate in a more visual way through animation, illustration, scribing, graphic facilitation, and storytelling exercises that lead to amazing ideas and more efficient ways of working.

According to Chris and Dan, “the enemy of creativity is predictability”, so they’ve chosen three drawing exercises that use randomness to prompt creative thinking. They also believe that people are scared when faced with limitless possibilities, but are much more creative when offered a limited set of resources and forced to improvise. These three exercises will give you some clear parameters within which you can begin to think in a more creative way, and they’re so simple and fun, you can do them whenever or wherever you want. Let’s get drawing!

3 Exercises to Boost Your Creativity:

1. Fill the circles

The aim of this exercise is to turn a series of circles into recognizable objects using your imagination. They begin by drawing some circles on a blank page and then have fun filling them in, transforming them into all kinds of playful pictures from ladybugs to rabbits. “This is the kind of workout you can do in the morning to just get your brain into gear for a creative day’s work,” says Dan. “Often when we’re creating meaningful illustrations, we’re looking for associations in shapes anyway, and thinking, ok, what does that shape allow me to do? How can I get playful with these shapes?”

2. Random squiggles

Now it's time to get a bit more abstract! Chris and Dan draw each other a random squiggle on a blank sheet of paper and challenge each other to turn it into some kind of picture. But that’s not all - they’ve also chosen some random phrases and written them down on post-it notes. They then each pick a phrase and use that as inspiration for their drawing, so that the phrases themselves work as captions for the pictures. The key isn’t to worry about being technically correct when you illustrate, it’s more of a mental exercise than showing off your drawing skills.

3. Alphabet soup

Chris and Dan use the letters from the alphabet as a starting point for this final exercise. The challenge here is to pick a letter, draw it, and then turn it into something that begins with that letter. For example, the letter A could be turned into an Angel, and the letter B into a bear. You can turn the letter upside down, to a 90 degree angle, or any way that works for you.

Exercises like these are all about being brave, experimenting, and making yourself get something down onto paper. Creativity, like many other things in life, can be improved through practise, so have fun with activities that train your brain to be more creative and adaptable, even under pressure.

Did you enjoy this tutorial? Would you like to learn the basics of visual note-taking and communicate complex ideas through simple, engaging stories? Then why not check out Scriberia’s new online course: Sketchnoting 101: Drawing as a Communication Tool.

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