Move beyond technical skills to emotional expression

Drawing with Confidence is a free online art course. Develop your drawing skills through playful exercises and thoughtful experimentation. Overcome barriers to self-expression and embrace the joy of mark making.

Part 8 — Key concepts we’ll explore:

The relationship between line quality and emotional response
Using pressure, speed, and rhythm to convey feeling
Creating atmospheric effects through mark-making techniques

Expressing mood through mark-making

Let’s take your drawing beyond technical accuracy into the realm of emotional expression. Every mark we make carries emotional content.

By becoming conscious of the expressive qualities of our mark-making, we can communicate feelings and moods more effectively in our drawings. The same subject can evoke completely different feelings based solely on how you make your marks.

The Emotional Spectrum of Marks

Different types of marks naturally evoke different emotional responses:

Sharp, angular marks suggest tension, aggression, or energy
Flowing, curved lines evoke calm, grace, or sensuality
Heavy, dark marks communicate power, certainty, or foreboding
Light, delicate marks suggest fragility, uncertainty, or gentleness
Chaotic, erratic marks convey confusion, turmoil, or excitement
Ordered, repetitive marks express control, stability, or meditation

Tools and Their Emotional Impact

Your choice of drawing tool significantly affects emotional expression:

Soft pencils and charcoal create rich, velvety blacks and expressive smudges
Hard pencils offer control and precision but can feel clinical
Ink provides commitment and boldness with no erasure
Brush pens combine fluidity with directness
Ballpoint pens allow for a gradual buildup of tone and texture

Mark-Making Exercise: Emotional Vocabulary

Take a large sheet of paper and divide it into six sections. Label each section with an emotion:

Joy
Anger
Melancholy
Serenity
Anxiety
Love

Fill each section with marks that express that emotion without drawing recognisable objects. Experiment with different:

Line qualities (thick/thin, straight/curved, continuous/broken)
Pressures (light/heavy)
Densities (sparse/crowded)
Rhythms (regular/irregular)
Directions (horizontal/vertical/diagonal/circular)

Spend about 5 minutes on each emotion, working intuitively rather than intellectually.

Application: Emotional Landscape

Create a simple landscape drawing (hills, trees, sky) three times, each expressing a different emotional quality:

Peaceful tranquility
Ominous foreboding
Vibrant energy

Notice how the same subject can convey vastly different feelings through your mark-making choices.

Confidence Boost

Your emotions aren’t distractions from your art. They’re the raw material of authentic expression. When you feel deeply and channel those feelings through your work, you create art that resonates beyond technique. Don’t hide your frustration, joy, uncertainty, or wonder. Transform them into visual language. The art that moves us most comes from artists brave enough to be vulnerable and put their internal landscape on the page without apology. Technical skills can be taught, but your unique emotional perspective is the irreplaceable gift only you can offer. Trust that your feelings, even the difficult ones, are not obstacles to your artistic voice but the very essence of it.

Exercise: Emotional Weather Map

In this exercise, we’ll create abstract drawings representing different emotional states using only lines and shapes. We’ll explore how the physical act of mark-making can become a direct channel for emotional expression.

Just as meteorologists map atmospheric conditions to track weather patterns, we'll create visual ‘maps’ of our internal emotional landscapes using only abstract marks. This practice bridges the gap between feeling and form, helping you develop an intuitive understanding of how line quality, pressure, rhythm, and composition naturally correspond to different emotional states.

By freeing yourself from representational concerns, you’ll discover how your hand naturally wants to move when expressing joy versus grief or anxiety versus serenity. This exploration will build a vocabulary of marks that you can later incorporate into more representational work, adding emotional resonance to everything you draw.

The time estimate for this exercise is 60 minutes (about 10 minutes per emotion).

Materials

Drawing paper (at least A4 / 9 x 12 inches)
Various drawing implements (pencils, pens, charcoal, markers)
Optional: watercolour or coloured pencils for subtle colour

Instructions

Create a grid of six equal sections on your paper
Label each section with an emotion:
- Joy
- Grief
- Anxiety
- Love
- Anger
- Serenity
For each emotion, create an abstract ‘weather map’ that expresses the feeling through:
- Line quality (thick/thin, straight/curved, continuous/broken)
- Mark density (sparse/crowded)
- Movement (direction, flow, rhythm)
- Contrast (light/dark, sharp/soft)
- Composition (centered/decentered, structured/chaotic)
Work intuitively, focusing on how the emotion feels rather than how it might be literally represented
After completing all six sections, write brief notes about your choices for each emotion
Share your map with a partner or group and see if they can identify the emotions based solely on your abstract expressions

Process

Developing sensitivity to the expressive qualities of mark-making
Translating internal states into visual language
Understanding the abstract components of emotional expression
Building confidence in non-representational drawing

Art in Focus

Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890)

Vincent Van Gogh, *Starry Night*, 1889. Source

Dutch post-impressionist Vincent van Gogh revolutionised the expressive potential of mark-making through his distinctive brushwork and line quality. Van Gogh's marks vibrate with emotional intensity—his short, urgent strokes in works like Starry Night or Wheatfield with Crows create a sense of movement that communicates his passionate engagement with his subjects.

In van Gogh’s letters to his brother Theo, he described how he sought to express emotions ‘not by the original colour, but by the manipulation of colour’. His marks range from delicate, sensitive outlines in his reed pen drawings to bold, almost sculptural impasto in his oil paintings. Even when depicting ordinary subjects like cypress trees or his bedroom, van Gogh’s distinctive mark-making transforms them into vessels of emotional expression.

Helen Frankenthaler (1928-2011)

Helen Frankenthaler, *Mountains and Sea*, 1952. Source

Abstract expressionist Helen Frankenthaler pioneered the ‘soak-stain’ technique, developing a revolutionary approach to mark-making characterised by luminous colour and fluid gesture. Throughout her career, Frankenthaler explored the relationship between colour, form, and the canvas, allowing thinned paint to seep directly into unprimed canvas.

Her breakthrough work Mountains and Sea features ethereal, translucent marks that appear to float on the surface, while later works like Western Dream and The Bay employ bold, expansive gestures that express deliberation and spontaneity. Unlike many of her contemporaries who emphasised texture and thickness, Frankenthaler’s marks reveal an intimate conversation between material and surface. Her work demonstrates how mark-making can embody atmospheric qualities and transform landscape-inspired experience into lyrical abstraction.

Connection to Your Practice

Vincent Van Gogh and Helen Frankenthaler show how marks can become direct expressions of emotional states rather than merely descriptive elements. Both artists developed highly personal visual languages through their distinctive mark-making. Their work reveals that how you make a mark—its pressure, direction, rhythm, and quality—can communicate as much emotional content as what you’re depicting.

Exploration Activity

Create a series of small studies of the same simple subject (a cup, plant, or self-portrait) using dramatically different mark-making approaches. Try emulating van Gogh’s energetic, rhythmic strokes in one version and Frankenthaler’s fluid, absorbed gestures in another. Pay attention to how different mark-making techniques change not just the appearance of your drawing but its emotional impact.

Up Next — Part 9: Keeping a Sketchbook

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Join a free online art course. Develop your drawing skills through playful exercises and thoughtful experimentation. Overcome barriers to self-expression and embrace the joy of mark making.