How this program works

Warm-up · 5 minutes

• No warm-up today. Read, then do the one task at the end.

The session

1. 1

   The two halves

   This course teaches one craft with two halves. The MASS half is Corot's: squinting a landscape into three or four flat shapes of value, laying tone with the side of the pencil, building trees as clumps that catch light, and letting the air soften everything that is far away. The LINE half is the draughtsman's, the tradition Robert Smith Forrest worked in: structure first, eye level and perspective, the arch constructed, tone counted out in layers of hatching, and the broken line that draws old stone.

   You will learn both, in alternating units, because a landscape with a building in it needs both at once. The capstone of the course is exactly that: a stone ruin drawn with the draughtsman's accuracy, standing inside Corot's air.

2. 2

   The session format

   Every session has the same shape. A warm-up (five minutes of drills that keep your hand loose). The steps (the actual work, each with a visual showing what the step should produce). What it should look like (so you know when you are done). Common failures (what goes wrong for every beginner, why, and the fix). A self-check (three to five yes-or-no questions; tick them honestly and the app records your progress). And often a master study: a real drawing by Corot, Cotman, Prout or one of the others, with notes on where to look.

   You draw on paper, by hand, the whole way. The screen is your teacher and your reference, never your canvas.

3. 3

   The twenty-minute rule

   Twenty minutes a day beats three hours on Sunday. Drawing is a motor skill and motor skills are built by frequent short practice, exactly like an instrument. If you only have twenty minutes, do the warm-up and one step and stop. The sessions are designed so that any step is a complete piece of practice on its own.

   A session's stated duration is the full thing. Splitting it over two or three days is normal.

4. 4

   The box

   Find a box, a folder or a drawer, and label it. Every drawing you make in this course goes in it, dated in the corner before you start. Do not throw anything away, not the bad ones, especially not the bad ones. Progress in drawing is invisible day to day and obvious month to month, and in six weeks you will need the evidence that it is happening.

   Today's task: label the box. Then write on a sheet of paper, in pencil, today's date and the words Day One. Draw anything at all beneath it, for five minutes, without judging it. Put it in the box.

Common failures