Quick-Fire Illustration Exercises

Learn how to optimize your drawing technique by practicing quick and simple illustration exercises, with Manu Montoya

You learn how to draw through practice. So it’s always a good idea to have a range of tricks up your sleeve. The following exercise is perfect for helping you to loosen up. And it shows how fast you can work without having to compromise on quality. It involves setting yourself quick-fire deadlines. You have to try and create the same illustration in ten minutes, then five minutes, and finally in a single minute!

Illustrator and Art Director Manu Montoya (@manumontoya) works for various advertising agencies and in publishing, sharing some of the practice techniques that she's built up over the years, in this tutorial she explains how she uses quick exercises to improve her work every day.

Find out more in the video below!

3 Quick Drawing Exercises

1. Create an illustration in 10 minutes

First, Manu sketches out her character: a jaguar, in red pencil. Having the outline speeds up her process and provides a useful reference. Using red pencil allows her to paint over her sketch, as the lines aren’t too strong and, by using this technique, she can also leave a little of the original sketch peeking through.

Then Manu uses gouache to paint her jaguar. An illustration technique that's currently very popular, gouache also dries quickly, which works well when you’re speed-painting. She then adds the shadows and other details with oil pastels, colored pencils, and Posca pens once the paint is dry.

2. Create the same illustration in 5 minutes

Because Manu now only has five minutes to complete her illustration, she approaches the color loosely, with watercolors. Washes allow you to create a completely different look from line drawing—you just have to remember to work from light to dark. This technique makes the jaguar look more ethereal.

She then uses any remaining time to add in the details. “This process forces me to accept my mistakes,“ explains the artist.

3. Recreate the same illustration in just 1 minute

The third exercise asks you to re-do the same illustration, but this time in only one minute. This forces you to really optimize your process, which makes it best to choose a single material. Manu uses water-soluble crayons, to be able to create both lines and shading.

If you enjoyed these exercises and you want to learn how to create fantastic worlds using mixed media, don’t miss Manu’s online course, Illustration for Children’s Book Covers. Through the course, you'll develop editorial designs from the cover to interpreting the brief to character design, and finally editing your work with digital software.

For more, explore all of Domestika's online illustration courses.

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- 3 Free Illustration Tutorials to Loosen up Your Hand
- 12 Online Courses to Learn How to Overcome Creative Block
- lllustrated Life Journal: A Daily Mindful Practice, a course by Kate Sutton
- The Art of Sketching: Transform Your Doodles into Art, a course by Mattias Adolfsson