The purpose of these exercises is to free your mind from thinking of things in the form of symbols. One really excellent way to do that is to take a picture from a magazine, or a photo or some thing like that and draw a picture of it upside-down. It sounds silly, but this is one of the greatest ways you can learn to see the lines and structure of an object rather than what your mind thinks it’s supposed to look like.

Set the picture down (even better, tape it down so you’re not tempted to turn it right side up 🙂 Get a blank piece of paper, or your sketchbook, and just start following a line in the image. Draw the outlines of everything in the picture. The result won’t be pretty, even experienced artists tend to make stuff look funky when they draw it upside-down. But right now all we’re concerned with is giving you a new way of seeing things. This is all groundwork for the fun stuff later.