This week I wanted to talk about a useful website I recently found called Line of Action. It’s a free website that focuses on improving drawing skills. It offers a “learn” section where you can find tips on improving technique or view outside resources. They also offer posts about finding inspiration, drawing challenges, and more as well as discussion boards and a section dedicated to critiques by other artists who use the website.
One of the many helpful articles on the website
One of the main features of the website is its “Practice Tools” section. Here they have a collection of images by photographers who gave the website the license to use them for the sole purpose of educational use within the website itself. Since the website has the license for a specific purpose and not the commercial license, they cannot give you the license to use them in work you would sell. Still, they’re great images to practice with in your sketchbook. (For more information about photograph usage please see their FAQ.)
The images are shuffled in a random order and come up one at a time in a slide show. However, before you start your session they let you customize it. What options you are given pertains to which practice selection you choose. For example if you choose to work on facial expressions, it gives you the option to focus on certain expressions or all of the ones they have available. For all of the practice sessions they let you control how long the images are shown for up to 10 minutes. Or you can also try what they call “class mode.” This mode includes a warm up section before going into longer sessions. Longer classes include breaks in them. Class sessions can run from 30 minutes up to 6 hours depending on what you choose.
Example of options for one of the practice tools
Although I’ve only been navigating the site for a short amount of time, I’ve found it to be an extremely useful tool (especially since I can now practice drawing right hands instead of left all the time!). Hopefully you find it as helpful as I have!
Until next week!
~Jordan
