NID DAT 2025 Drawing Tips, Tricks

Candidates seeking admission to the B.Des and M.Des courses at the NIDs will have to appear in a drawing and sketching exam. The NID DAT 2025 (Prelims) exam will be held on Janaury 5, 2025. Here we share tips to master drawing and sketching skills.

Candidates seeking admission to B.Des and M.Des courses offered by NID participating colleges must take the NID DAT 2025 entrance exam. The National Institute of Design (NID) will conduct the NID DAT 2025 (Prelims) exam on January 5, 2025. The exam will held in a pen-and-paper mode in 22 cities across the country. The candidate had to choose the NID DAT 2025 exam center when filling out the application form. Note that the NID DAT 2025 application form closed on December 6, 2024. On the day of the exam, bring your NID DAT admit card 2025 and photo ID proof. Also, when inside the exam center, make sure that you follow NID DAT 2025 exam-day guidelines. The DAT Prelims question paper for the exam will include textual and visual questions. The scores of NID DAT Prelims will be used to shortlist candidates for DAT Mains.

M.Des DAT Mains (Studio Test) for shortlisted candidates will be conducted starting March 3, 2025. B.Des DAT Mains will be conducted from April 26 - May 4, 2025. The Aptitude part will contain questions on Quantitative Aptitude, Logical Reasoning, GK and Current Affairs, and English. While the NID drawing part will have questions related to rendering, sketching, human figures, color schemes, scale, proportion, design solutions, and more. One must have a good presence of mind and long drawing practice to crack this. Check out the below-mentioned tips and tricks to understand the NID entrance exam’s drawing part.

Develop Visualization skills

A budding NID 2025 candidate has to work on qualities like creativity, observation, and imagination. Qualities like these can't be developed in an interval of time. So, if you wish to be best at drawing and sketching it's advisable to start as early as you can.

Understand Memory Drawing 

Memory drawing is one of the important parts of preparation for the NID DAT test. Most of aspiring students can do excellent copy drawing but find it difficult to draw from memory. One can start developing observation skills and lots of practice. Live sketching will also add to refine this part.

Practice Technical Drawing 

To crack the NID drawing section, an understanding of Technical Drawing is a must. Technical Drawing or Engineering Drawing is not conventional drawing. It includes mandatory drawing topics:

• Perspective Drawing
• Composing 3-Dimensional elements
• Light and Shadow
• Scale and Proportions

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Drawing Straight Lines

Design students must practice freehand straight lines: verticals, horizontals, and diagonals. Avoid using scales, and other drawing accessories. Doing it daily will help to create a balance in drawing and reduce dependability on scale. This is one of the important points to remember in the preparation of the NID entrance exam.

Knowledge of Figure & Live Drawing

Figure drawings or still-life drawings are practiced by making observations of the physical world. These can be human models, but can also include objects like fruit, vehicles, or items in nature. It helps students to learn perspective, proportions, and shading.

Practice without Eraser:

Erasing the drawing takes a lot of time, smudges your work, and makes it unfit to render later on. It leaves an adverse impact on the person checking that drawing.

Ideas of drawing tools and medium:

Students must have a proper understanding of drawing tools and different mediums. Read out the below-given list to recall the important drawing tools before appearing in NID 2025 DAT:

• Chalk is a powdery drawing tool suitable tool for blending and shading and works on many surfaces. It's easily transferable among surfaces.
• Charcoal is a crumbly black material made of carbon. It's often sold in sticks or pencils, an excellent tool for shading and blending.
• Colored pencils are wood shells with wax or oil-pigmented centers. They're less likely to smudge but still blend easily.
• Wax crayons add color to drawings in a non-transferable way. These are difficult to use for blending and shading.
• Graphite is a metallic gray powder that comes in pencils and sticks. It's often used for line drawing, blending and shading.
• Pastels are sticks of powdered pigment made from oil or water-based materials. They're excellent for blending.

Tips to improve drawing skills for NID DAT 2025 exam

Here are a few tips that you can use to improve your drawing skills. 

Work on your observation

The Design Aptitude Test will evaluate the candidate's ability to draw a particular situation from a particular of view. For instance, you may be given an image , say of a kitchen, and then asked to draw the a perspective drawing from the point of view of a person standing at the window. 

Now to be able to draw these kind of images, you need to not only have great creativity, but also perspective and observation skills.

You need to train your eyes for various types of situations and practice drawing from various perspectives.

Experiment with Different Mediums

If you try out different mediums, your knowledge of the subject is only going to grow.

A few mediums that you may try and their pros and cons are listed below.

Medium	Pros	Cons
Pencil	You can edit the sketch over and over again.	Limited to grayscale
Charcoal	Rich blacks, good for shading	Messy, can smudge easily
Ink	Bold and permanent	You can’t easily edit the lines or color without damaging the sketch.

Master Perspectives

You must understand the perspectives.

• One-point perspective
• Two-point perspective
• Three-point perspective

The candidate needs to understand what the different perspectives mean, how they are used, when to use them, etc.

NID Study Materials for drawing:

There is no prescribed syllabus for NID DAT 2025 drawing test. However Shiksha has jotted down some good to read books and test paper to get an overall idea of drawing questions of NID.

• Rendering in Pen and Ink by Robert W. Gill
• Basic Rendering by Robert W. Gill
• Design Drawing by Francis D.K. Ching
• NID Entrance Exam Question Papers
• Arihant's Ultimate Guide for NIFT/NID/IIFT Entrance Exam by Arihant Publications
• Solve NID DAT 2025 sample papers

Sample Drawing Questions for NID DAT 2025

The DAT Prelims exam will include textual and visual questions.

The NID DAT question paper has two sections, with drawing-based questions typically asked in Part II. 

Given below are a few sample sketching or design-based questions asked in the DAT Prelims exam. You can download and practice them for free.

• NID DAT 2025 Sample Questions - Download Here

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Other Tips:

• Practice drawing whatever comes in your imagination, or anything around you.
• Try various forms of drawing, like caricature, photorealism, figure, cartoon, animation, doodling, gestural, technical, etc. 
• Draw light outline instead of rigid ones in the design exams in order make it look clean.
• Do you own research of drawing along with some good online drawing series. It will add to your preparations.

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