Drawing skills for industrial designers

Drawing skills for industrial designers

At Life Drawing Academy, we regularly receive questions and comments from students from all over the world. Recently, Gabriel from France sent us the following question: "I am currently studying industrial design, where drawing from imagination and rapid sketching of ideas are essential skills. I'm curious to know if the program you offer could indirectly assist me in improving these skills. Thank you."

Feedback from Vladimir London, a Life Drawing Academy tutor

Dear Gabriel,

Thank you for your question.

The Life Drawing Academy Correspondence Course is a great way to get strong drawing skills if you want to become a professional fine artist, illustrator, architect, graphic or industrial designer.

Drawing is a non-verbal language of communication, the way of expressing thoughts and ideas. As such, it can be used universally, including industrial design. The rules of perspective, elements of composition, golden proportions, theory of chiaroscuro etc. will be exactly the same whatever you sketch - portraits, figures, landscapes, buildings, man-made objects.

For rapid sketching of industrial design, you will need the same skills as a fine artist - ability to draw confident lines as intended by your mind, good eye-hand coordination, good "sense of perspective", knowledge of proportions, deep understanding of constructive drawing, know-how of drawing intersected objects, and so on. You are correct that "drawing from imagination and rapid sketching of ideas are essential skills" for industrial designers. Good skills of drawing from imagination come from skills of drawing from life. For example, your "sense of perspective" can only be developed by making numerous drawings of geometric bodies from life. Such solids as cubes, cylinders, cones, prisms and spheres, are "building blocks" for the majority of man-made objects. Think of anything you can create as a designer from household objects to engines, cars, aircrafts, any other machinery, buildings, furniture, etc. All those objects will consist of some simple geometric elements. And even if you design some organically-looking objects, you would still need perspective to draw them. Rapid sketching skills also come from drawing from life. That is why skills of any industrial designer will depend not only on how well one could use computer programs for design, but also how well he or she could draw. When it comes to learning professional drawing skills, I doubt that your college will give you the same deep knowledge of all those things as you would get in the Life Drawing Academy Correspondence Course. Please correct me if I'm wrong, and send examples of tasks and drawings done by students at your college. We have students from different fields - art, design, architecture. They all say that the drawing skills we teach are far more advanced than what they learn at their colleges.

At Life Drawing Academy, your drawing curriculum will be custom-tailored to your needs. It will consist of 100 drawing tasks. If you want to concentrate on industrial drawing, in your tasks, you will learn constructive drawing, including perspective, contours, intersections, proportions, and other special topics in addition to life drawing.

To learn good drawing techniques, enroll in the Life Drawing Academy course: