PRACTISE SKETCHING!

by Johan Adda
first appeared on Mission UX email list.

Two years ago I wanted to become better at sketching. I went to a workshop by Kevin Cheng. We started to warm up our hands by drawing circles and lines. Then we drew tons of faces, expressions, circles and lines together. I became better.

From practising, I ended up working on a little animation:

Why is it a good habit?

Because a pen and a paper are always the simplest objects to use. Give a pen to a kid, any age, and he or she will start drawing. A pen doesn’t require any software or battery. It’s an extension of your brain. You don’t need to think about it.

Why sketch human experiences?

You want to express ideas faster than any digital tool could. Sketching is not about quality, it’s about now, the moment. Ideas are volatile and you need to capture them quickly.

We are visual people. It’s a fantastic way to share ideas with others to open conversations. And for personal ideas, it’s good to archive them and retrieve them easily. You don’t need to know how to draw, seriously.

Stop reading! Let’s start.

Warmup:

1. Grab a pen, any colour, and a piece of paper. In 1 minute, draw tons of parallel lines. Don’t worry about the quality — this is your warming up time. Try different lengths.

2. Next, draw some circles. Circles together, some circles inside, big ones, small ones. After 30 seconds, connect the start point with the end point of your circles.

First Challenge:

1. Let’s make this more fun. Take another piece of paper and draw a line of circles the same size. Make two more lines of circles beneath the first one so that they’re roughly aligned. In each circle, draw a pair of eyes at the same position. Just 2 dots. Like this:

2. In the top line’s circles draw the mouth as a short line. Once you’re ready, start drawing some eyebrows to make expressions.

3. In the second line draw only the mouths. Draw different feelings. Don’t think too much.

4. Now, in the bottom line, take the eyebrows from the top line and mix them with the mouths in the middle line.

You will end up with all kinds of faces. If you want to add a further challenge, try to label each of the faces with one of the following basic emotions:
joy, sadness, trust, disgust, fear, anger, surprise, anticipation.

Hey! You just learned to draw facial expressions.

Frequency

Practise every day for 5–10 minutes until next week’s exercise.

It’s a good idea to buy a notebook with lines — not blank white pages or squares. Use the lines to help you align things.

Challenges

If you get bored after a few days, here is an alternative challenge for you:
. Day two: see below. Draw 2 lines of 4–5 vignettes. Use your day 1 results.
. Day three: Try to illustrate 7 basic emotions.
. Day four: Use vertical and horizontal arcs to change the orientation of the face.
. Day five: Sketch reactions to 3 of your faces.

Tools

A black pen with a 0.5 nib, a pencil, an A5 notebook .
Take a photo of your progress every day. 
Keep the photos in a folder called Sketching UX EX01.
Find all the assets and a PDF of the exercise here. Link

A bit of science

All the exercises you’re going to complete are based on human experiences. So we’re going to learn about how we feel, how we behave, etc.

I like to keep in mind Plutchik’s wheel of emotions. Link

There is also an amazing work from MIT Media Lab based on online votes. You can watch animated gifs that illustrate emotions from various sources. 
I love it. Link

Thanks to Kevin Cheng’s amazing preso on UIE. Link