How to Build an Architectural Practice Routine You Can Actually Keep
Practice time: those long stretches between practice sessions can make drawing buildings harder than it needs to be. Your ability to measure proportion, arrange spaces, and draw buildings doesn’t disappear, but it does get harder to access if it’s not practiced on a regular basis. Many beginners fail because they set up a practice routine that can’t sustain itself. Most of us have to fit practice around our other responsibilities, so it’s best to create a practice routine that can do the same. The goal is to create enough practice to keep improving, but not so much that it becomes a daunting task.
The first step is to set up a daily practice routine that’s as close to the same as possible. One way to do this is to pick a single topic and draw it for several days. You might spend three or four days drawing door proportions, or stairways, or room shapes, or shadow on a simple building shape. If you focus on a single topic, you can more easily notice when your drawings are improving. If you’re drawing something different every day, it’s much harder to track improvement. If you focus on the same topic for several days, you can start to see patterns. Your drawings become surer, you can make better comparisons, and you begin to recognize your mistakes before you’re finished.
A common mistake here is to only practice when you have a long block of time available. This almost never happens, so instead try to fit your practice into smaller blocks of time. A shorter practice session with a clear task is much better than a long session in which you struggle to decide what to draw. Another common mistake is to change media all the time in order to keep yourself inspired. New pens, new paper, new images can all be inspiring, but you should try to repeat the same media for as long as you can. Repetition of process is more important than variety of materials.
Sometimes you won’t feel like practicing. Sometimes you’ll be tired, or stuck, or uninspired. Don’t worry about this. Instead, scale back your practice rather than giving it up. Instead of drawing a whole façade, practice just a door. Or just a roofline. Or just one corner of a room. Trace a building you drew earlier and correct just the proportions. Draw the outline of a building from a photograph, but only the outline. Don’t worry about any of the details. All of these variations will keep your practice going and will still help you improve your judgement. The key is to simply keep practicing, so don’t worry if it’s hard. A short, lousy drawing made when you’re not in the mood is always better than a grandiose practice plan that you never implement.
If you only have 15 minutes, you can still have a useful practice session. Spend the first 5 minutes studying your image and identifying the largest relationships. Where are the biggest forms? Which lines dominate the composition? In the next 5 minutes, lightly draw the big forms. Don’t try to do anything else. In the last 5 minutes, pick one area to refine. You might refine the pitch of a roof, or the spacing of a window. You might refine the depth of a recessed wall. The next day, come back to a similar image so you can test whether your corrections worked.
Finally, I think it’s very helpful if you end each practice session with a quick note about what did and didn’t work. This doesn’t need to be anything formal. Just a sentence or two. “Today my openings were too narrow.” “I was able to improve the façade by paying attention to the shadow.” Over time, these notes will help you track your progress, but they will also help you track your habitual errors. This is one of the key secrets of improvement. Architecture is iterative, and your practice routine should help you capture that. With time, your practice routine will become just another part of your life, but it will also become a part of how you see, how you understand, and how you draw buildings.