Drawing Drills - Footballers in Motion | Football Craft Activities

Hello from the National Football Museum and welcome to our second online drawing drills workshop.

In these workshops we'll be helping you to bring a little football flair to your  

illustrations. My name is Millie and I'm an artist from Cheshire. I love football and my favourite team  

is Manchester United. The most fun part of my job as an artist is that I get to draw footballers in  

action. For example, here are some of my drawings in the football paper 'The Grassroots Post' and today  

I'll be showing you how to draw your own. Make sure you have some paper and some drawing tools.  

You can use whatever stationary you'd like. Football is all about movement. When I draw  

footballers it's important to make my drawings expressive and full of motion. Today I'll show  

you how to draw players running, jumping, kicking a ball - some of the things you might see in a  

football match. To start off this workshop get some paper and drawing tools and begin to draw.

As you can see here, I'm just making some marks with the pen to get a feel of the different shapes  

and lines I can make with it. My top tip would be to draw quick lines, I'm not neat with my lines and  

it makes my drawings have a lot of movement. First off I'll show you how I draw a standing footballer.  

I start off with the head, add a neck and then I begin the rest.

A footballer is made of quite simple shapes when you think about it. The football kit is made of  

blocks. You have the sleeves, then the front of the shirt, then the shorts, then the socks and the boots.

So now I'm going to draw a bit more  movement, starting with a running footballer.

If you imagine someone running, their legs are  

in opposite directions, so here I've got one leg forward and one leg back  

and making sure to use really quick lines with my pen to give the drawing momentum.

If you look behind the player, I've drawn four little lines  

these are called motion lines and it shows that the player is running at great speed.

Now for our jumping player I've imagined what a person looks like when they're in the air.  

They're mid-jump, about to head the ball and land back on the ground. The legs are getting  

ready to land and there's motion lines below their feet to show how high they've jumped.

Here is a player kicking the ball, it looks like they're booting it across a field  

so their leg is stretched really far out and their other leg is firmly on the floor.

The lines are really bold to show that the ball is moving fast and I wrote 'Boom!' the sound of kicking  

the ball. Sometimes I like to add words to my drawing just to add a bit more to the scene.

Finally, I'm going to draw one of my favourite things to draw: a goalkeeper. Starting off with a  

simple circle for the head and then I add the arms. They are stretched out trying to save the ball.

Goalkeepers also use their legs to jump and dive to the side  

and also to save the ball, so the rest of this goalkeeper's body is very stretched out.

I drew a circle for the ball and lines behind it to show that the ball is headed towards the goal.

I went over this with a bolder pen and added more depth to the drawing.

I also added a hint of the goal in the background.

Thank you so much for joining us today for drawing drills, I hope you had fun. Keep practicing with  

your footballers and make sure you share your illustrations with us on social media. We are  

@footballmuseum on Twitter. You can find more home craft activities at nationalfootballmuseum.com  

or on our YouTube channel. We hope to welcome you to the National Football Museum soon, bye for now!