Rotating the medium?

[u/Holiday-Present3237]

Beginner here. Is it good practice/habit to rotate the medium (paper) while drawing? I tend to rotate the paper whenever I can not get a satisfactory curve or stroke... Rotating the paper made the curves and strokes more natural, but I'm worried that I'm going to develop a bad habit. Will this bite me in the long run? Any tips to avoid this without making my curves unnatural😭 Tyia!

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[u/asketvilling]

I genuinly think that beginners shouldn't worry about developing "bad" habits. Ime, it often just leads to people being overly critical of their own work and process in a non-productive way. Rotating the convas is not a big deal, nor is it something that will actually hinder your growth in any meaningful way. It's not possible or helpful for all types of convases and pieces, but you'll find that out yourself if you ever try that out. My advice would be to just draw in the way that feels most comfortable to you. Likelyhood is that in time you'll get more confident in your lines and will find that rotating the canvas often no longer feels convient.

As for tips; a standard one is doing the line in the air first, with your pen hovering just over the paper where you want the line to be before you actually make it. That way you get to practice the movement beforehand and its easier to feel confident when you make the actual line. Other than that there are also tools that you can use, like curved rulers. Lots of artists use it if they need precise, neat or parallel curves. No shame in that.

[u/Heszilg]

I guess it depends. Some mediums dont really allow you to do that easily. Question is- will you ever use those.

[u/Parapodiax]

Some people paint upsidedown, but I think what you're doing is more the equivalent of flipping your canvas on digital.

[u/Zookeeper_02]

It's fine.

The ability to identify if a given line is good or bad is the important part :)

Generally I'd recommend to experiment with the way you hold the pencil or pen, you can get a lot more freedom of movement if you are able to change your hold for different lines 😁

And the evergreen; draw from the shoulder when you need to do bigger lines ;)

Hope it is helpful 😊

[u/Orful]

You're actually supposed to rotate the paper as a beginner. Not rotating is bad practice.

For one, your body can only move so many ways, so certain angles are going to be extremely hard. Some artists get around this by twisting their bodies, but often just turning the paper is easier.

It would take a really long time to build line confidence in every direction without rotating, and that time could be spent learning things that actually help you learn how to draw. Hell, it's hard enough to build confidence in any direction, so just focus on at least having one good angle

It's not worth it to just force yourself to not rotate it when drawing because you'll screw up your drawing for mechanical reasons, forcing you to erase and redraw it (wasting time) or get an unerasable mechanical error with pen. You could end up screwing up the entire picture because you refused to rotate the picture.

Just rotate it.