Drawing Confident Lines

Lines are the alphabet of drawing. A confident line looks intentional, smooth and alive. A hesitant line, made of many short scratchy strokes, makes even a well-proportioned drawing look insecure. The good news: confident lines are pure technique, and technique can be trained.

What makes a line confident

A confident line is:

• Drawn in one stroke, not built from many small scratches.
• Drawn at a steady speed. Speed smooths out the small tremors of your hand.
• Planned. You know where it starts and where it ends before touching the paper.
• Driven by the arm, as you learned in the previous lessons.

The ghosting method

Ghosting is the most useful line technique you'll ever learn. Before drawing, you rehearse the movement in the air, just above the paper.

1. Mark the start and end points with small dots.
2. Ghost: move your arm along the path, a few millimeters above the paper, two or three times. Watch the end point, not the pencil tip.
3. Draw: lower the pencil and make the line in one motion, with the same rhythm as your ghosting.

Speed and pressure

Slow lines wobble. Very fast lines miss their target. Find a speed that feels slightly faster than comfortable. Begin and end each stroke lightly, like an airplane taking off and landing, so lines taper and connect smoothly.

Straight lines, curves and directions

Practice lines in all directions: horizontal, vertical and diagonal. Most people have a comfortable direction. Rotate the paper if needed, but also train the hard angles: in a real drawing you can't always rotate.

Train curves too: C-curves and S-curves of different sizes. Curves give life to a drawing; most natural forms contain no perfectly straight lines.

Try it: the line trainer

Connect the dots with one confident stroke. Your score measures how accurately you hit the dots, how straight the line is and how fluid the motion was.