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Ask HN: Anyone here have good material for learning how to sketch from scratch?
283 points by autotune on Feb 25, 2022 | hide | past | favorite | 130 comments
Apologies if this is off-topic but the learning French thread got me wondering if anyone here is an artist in the downtime and has recommendations for learning materials when it comes to learning how to draw? I've tried Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain and it doesn't do it for me. I've tried nma.art and that's like the closest I've come to what I'm after but currently suffer from paralysis analysis with too many or too few courses to choose from. Any suggestions? I'm hoping to be able to eventually draw people and landscapes, willing to pay hundreds of dollars potentially for the right course or instruction per month not really looking for like a udemy type thing.



Commercial artist for 45 years. Also a developer, FWIW, mostly graphics programming since the late 1970s.

_Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain_ is actually one of the best places to start. I know you said you tried it. But try it this way: Ignore all the theory and the stories the author tells. It’s mostly nonsense. But the exercises are actually very good. The trick is to not care about the result and about making progress. I know, that sounds crazy. But it’s true.

Just do it.

Go through reams of cheap paper. Happily throw most of the drawings away. Draw anything and everything. Fall in love with nothing. It’s like practicing scales for a musician. If you get a good drawing every now and then, then cool. If not, don’t worry about it.

It’s gonna take some time.

Be prepared to adjust your expectations as to what a good drawing is. It will change, drastically, over time. The way you draw will emerge rather than be something you develop or manage. Frustrating, I know. But the basics have to develop organically, like learning to talk.

Learning to draw is much more about learning to see than making marks. You think you can see things, but what you are really doing is recognizing things. Any normal adult has the motor skills to make a controlled mark. But we don’t know how to make a mark that the brain will read as something. If it was just a matter of reproducing something that’s in front of you, then tracing would work. But nearly all tracings suck as drawings.

Having said all that, start reading anything you can find on the subject. Be prepared to ignore most of it. You are finding your own path.

You can look through my history on ycombinator more discussion and to to see lists of books that are worth your time. But look on your own too. If you find anything new and different, please share.

As far as goals, they are great things to have. But expect them to change and evolve. Why shouldn’t they. As you get better, your tastes will change. Things you saw that seemed wonderful, may suddenly be full of flaws. Things you disdained may suddenly reveal their secret appeal.

It’s an adventure as well as a skill. And the learning never stops. I’m in my 60s and have been drawing seriously since my early teens.

I’m just getting started.


"Learning to draw is much more about learning to see than making marks."

This was the most helpful thing I learned from _Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain_. That book alone took me from "poorly drawn stick figures" to "recognizable sketches of people and simple objects". It's been a while since I've exercised any of this, but it's on my list to re-learn One Of These Days™.


I started drawing a few years ago then took a college course.

Learning to see what is the major theme and made an amazing difference.

I would leave some sessions as if in a trance seeing the world in ways I’ve never had before


> I’m in my 60s and have been drawing seriously since my early teens.

> I’m just getting started.

I think this is intended to be encouraging, but to me it has the opposite effect. If it's going to take me 45 years to just get started, then I won't waste my time on it, I'll do something else instead.

Is it possible that you're not just getting started, but you are still learning things, albeit at a much slower rate than you were 45 years ago?


“From the age of 6 I had a mania for drawing the shapes of things. When I was 50 I had published a universe of designs. But all I have done before the the age of 70 is not worth bothering with. At 75 I'll have learned something of the pattern of nature, of animals, of plants, of trees, birds, fish and insects. When I am 80 you will see real progress. At 90 I shall have cut my way deeply into the mystery of life itself. At 100, I shall be a marvelous artist. At 110, everything I create; a dot, a line, will jump to life as never before. To all of you who are going to live as long as I do, I promise to keep my word. I am writing this in my old age. I used to call myself Hokusai, but today I sign my self 'The Old Man Mad About Drawing.’”


I love people with that level of mastery. It's sad that so many choose to retire. Those who dive deep into their craft seem to reach such incredible levels of skill.


Here’s another anecdote that might be more to your liking. It’s true, BTW. I started drawing seriously when I was 12. Everyone considered me really amazing by 16. I consider myself to have plateaued at 20. I’m not aware of having improved in any specific way since, but I’m Disney-level good, and I can draw anything from life or imagination in a variety of styles and levels of realism. Portraits too. I’m in my mid 40s now.

I'm not opposed to the idea of continuous learning and improvement. It's more like in art (and programming as well), I vastly surpassed my original goals, and I'm already overqualified to do anything that I like to do and am interested in doing. I certainly do not have the skill or knowledge to do everything that is possible to do, but I don't care about that.

I suspect my attitude may differ from that of many artists. I'm not on a journey to explore some mystery. I just need the skills to execute on the projects that I imagine.


The gap between what I imagine and desire motivates my art and coding. "Damn, I can't find what I want to listen to. I guess I'll have to make this song up that my brain wants to hear, myself."


Reminds me of this Ira Glass quote:

“Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.”


I’m the same with music and games!


> "If it's going to take me 45 years to just get started, then I won't waste my time on it"

You'll spend your 45 years one way or another; see also "life is a journey, not a destination" and "find something you love and you'll never work a day in your life". If you hate drawing. If you love doing the activity 'drawing' then 45 years of drawing will seem like a life well spent even if you still consider yourself just getting started.

What are you going to do when you get to "I can draw"? Draw things? Spend your time drawing things? But you don't want to spend your time drawing things to get there? You know you can pay people to do that for you if you just want the result 'pictures of things', right?


I think it has a lot to do with what they said about your goals changing. When I first started painting a decade ago, my goal was to do a good oil portrait. But now, painting has become so personal and spiritual to me, that my goals aren't as external like they used to be. I realized a few years ago that while I am in the process of painting something, I have no fear in my heart. Exploring that has become more of my goal, and one could spend many lifetimes working through it.


It takes decades to get professional good at precision physical skills.

That's not to say you won't be twice as good of a drawer as you are now, in 2 years of serious practice.

But if you're measuring yourself against people who have spent their entire lives working on a thing... it's going to take some time to get to that level.


Decades feels a bit long, from what I've seen/experienced. I'd say if you're dedicated you can hit a professional level in 5-7 years.


you can get decent at drawing in 1-2 years, getting good will take a lifetime. the issue is that as you are learning to draw, you are also learning to see. your operable definition of good will be continuously changing, but the fruits of your labour probably would've been very impressive to the 'you' of 2 years ago.


"Just getting started", I feel the same with the guitar. Been playing since I was 12, 40 years on with quite a few breaks still love it and having fun will never be a pro! I work with loads of great artists, I really can't draw (but am according to the deeds of my apprenticeship a qualified draftsman!) but still love to doodle and sketch. The awesome artists I teach and work with always amaze me, mostly the really good ones always have a sketch book with them and always doodle. This is the key, love it, practice it and enjoy :-)


> You think you can see things, but what you are really doing is recognizing things. Any normal adult has the motor skills to make a controlled mark.

I have reasonably nimble fingers and at least average overall motor control, and really cannot do this. I got pretty good at drawing a handful of things as a kid by just repeating the same pattern every time, but even on those my lines were just awful. I'm sure I could get better at it with tons of drilling (and probably just starting over from scratch, technique-wise—I expect I'd have to totally re-train the way I do the entire activity, to fix whatever's wrong) but a little drawing here and there with lots of attention to trying to fix that has done nothing. I cannot make a remotely straight line of any length at all (an inch would be pushing my abilities, and I'd probably fail like half the time). Circles are right out. I have a good enough eye for perspective that I can make useful and recognizable sketches for e.g. home projects, but they look like a 2-year-old drew them because the lines are so bad.

Step 1 for me absolutely would be learning how to make marks that are anywhere near my intention.


If you're interested in investing time into improving (it's hard to tell based on your comment alone) it sounds like https://drawabox.com/ (it's free) starts with just what you're asking for -- how to make straight lines on a page. A big part of the first lesson is practicing how to make confident, accurate strokes using your whole arm.


Cool, thanks. Yeah, I'm pretty sure there's something fundamentally incorrect about how I draw, even though it feels fine (but the results are terrible).


I'll second the recommendation of drawabox. That site helped my drawing a lot.


If you're anything like me, I think it's a matter of visualisation, not coordination. I tend to shake if I try hold my hand still (and always have), my hand-writing is downright awful. My sketches / drawings are terrible - I dislike visual brainstorming sessions quite a bit!

However, I did start going through Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain a while back and seriously impressed myself by following the exercises. No, I can't draw a circle or a straight line, but those things don't exist in nature; especially when you factor in perspective.

When in the right mind-set I found I wasn't thinking about shapes at all, I was just trying to make something look the way I was visualising it. For me that's the hard part. I normally think analytically "A stop sign is a octagon with some straight lines. Stop lights are circles." That's simply not true when you're trying to draw. Which is just as well, because I can't draw those shapes for squat!

I don't think I'll ever be able to draw diagrams/charts. However, I'm sure if I kept practising I could get reasonably good at drawing people & objects. Even in a cartoon style, I think I could, with a lot of effort, improve to an acceptable standard. Even cartoons tend to have some sort of perspective and characters are not symmetrical.


This is EXACTLY my experience. I took an adult learning class at a community art center and it almost literally opened my eyes. On day one, we were to draw an egg and mine looked awful. The instructor said I draw like a child, which really stung but it was true and he was being literal, not cruel.

I was stuck there my whole life, but this class taught me to stop using lines and “sketch light” (shading instead of line drawings) and use the whole arm with elbow up off the table for those circles and lines.

Draw a Box will help you, and pay a mentor if needed too.


_Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain_ is fantastic. Helped me enormously when I learned to draw. I'd encourage you to do the exercise in order, and spend some time with each one, and then draw a lot between them, trying to integrate what you've learned. You'll get there!


Are there any courses that help accelerate developing accuracy in sketching? I particularly want to draw figures and faces and animated poses.

Like maybe something on composition? What about that book cartooning the head & figure?

Or do u just gotta sketch 9000000000000000000 times to get it?

I'm an amateur artist and drew every day as a kid. My sketches always have incorrect proportions if I just try to freehand it. Obviously I could trace but that defeats the purpose. It's frustrating because I already have lots of actual hours put into the craft.


It’s practice and learning. Drawing is just rendering volumes as shapes. You learn first how the process works, then practice to adjust your motor skills. I’ve been drawing on and off since I was 8. I’m 26 now and I’m just decent. The above is what will really help you. Like what is the form of the eye, and what would be its shape from that angle. Then If you can draw any geometric shape accurately (by comparing line length and angle), you can draw the eye.


I came here to say this. I studied art in school (but not an art school, so I'm not very good :) but this book was really the core of the curriculum. The exercises and approach radically helped me improved my drawing. The other component is just practicing a lot. I can't remember the URL, but there was a developer I used to follow who could not draw at all and just committed to drawing every day (using similar exercises). Over the years, he got really good.


This^

Be ready to and accepting of failure. lots and lots of failure. Trying and failing is the fastest and surest way to learn. Once you let yourself fail lots then the cost of failure drops significantly and the ROI increases sharply.


Logged in to say Thank you!


Draw a Box [0] comes highly recommended. All lessons are free and are taught from scratch. Everything from absolute basics is thoroughly explained and demonstrated.

Paid courses by Proko [1] are also said to be of very high quality. I have never bought one, though.

I would also suggest that you look into digital art. Sketching/painting/drawing paraphernalia is expensive with time-consuming upkeep and hard to carry if you travel. OTOH, drawing on Krita, Photoshop with drawing tablets & stylus (even $60 ones) or an iPad with pen is low-maintenance and you can find other uses for them even if you don't continue drawing.

Digital art and conventional art have many overlappings, but they are different media with neither being higher or lower.

[0]: https://drawabox.com/

[1]: https://proko.com


As someone who "can draw" by most people's standards, but who never had a formal art education, I benefited a lot from Draw a Box. I liked that it focused so much on the actual, literal mechanics of drawing a good line with your body, which is not something I had ever focused on.

I think it builds sort of slowly, and you need commitment to get through to the part where you're drawing "the rest of the owl" so to speak, aka the fun parts that aren't just endless pages of boxes in perspective.

But, there really isn't a shortcut anyway, and it's worth it, and this course is presented really well, for no money.


Another upvote for Drawabox. Some other commenters here have said things like "Anyone can do decent mark making" and "It's more about seeing than drawing".

Drawabox proved to me that it's a LOT to do with mark making. The difference between a line drawn straight, with confidence, and one that is wobbly and not confident, is huge. It makes a big difference as to the quality of the overall drawing. Just a page of boxes drawn in 3D space, with each line drawn confidently and straight, can look impressive.


The free Proko videos on YouTube are not bad as well -- maybe a good place to turn once you have a few of the basics in hand -- in particular, the artistic anatomy videos are helpful if you get into drawing humans.

In regards to digital art, I recommend the opposite. A sketchbook and a few pencils can be had for far less than the cost of a drawing tablet or iPad, and the physicality of drawing with analog material is, for some of us at least, part of the appeal.

Lastly, try to draw every day: from life, from memory, from imagination. Take whatever classes appeal, for sure... but in the end, the time you put in, drawing things that interest you visually, is what really makes the difference in the long run.


I'm a self-taught artist and count drawing as a skill of mine. I wouldn't say I'm a "natural" at it and would have definitely benefited from some structured learning.

Here are some of my recommendations/thoughts:

1. Bring a sketchbook with you everywhere and draw and observe what you see. There are shortcuts and techniques but like anything else it takes practice and time.

2. Humans are the most difficult because they are what we're experts at. We see and react to human faces from the day we are born so it's tricky to get right. Don't be discouraged.

3. Writing your name is drawing a picture. You've probably practiced it along with the alphabet numerous times. This is drawing in it's essence.

4. Learn what a core and cast shadow are if you don't already know. This will quickly improve your rendering.

5. Youtube. There is a higher level of skill in art then at any point in history and you have access to it. Just like any other field the knowledge passed down improves year after year.

6. Don't worry about the outcome. Drawing is intimate and doesn't need to be shown to anyone ever.

7. Drawing is a beautiful skill. You're creating something out of nothing.


>Humans are the most difficult because they are what we're experts at. We see and react to human faces from the day we are born so it's tricky to get right. Don't be discouraged.

Totally agree. A few thoughts:

1. I watched a show once on TV that used a grid pattern approach that appealed to my engineering aesthetics. They made a transparent square grid pattern that was placed on the desired picture as a temporary overlay. You then create a scaled up grid in very, very light pencil on your desired sketch piece of paper. You finally, started to work the large outer boundaries first and then iterate inwards to the greater details of the face. By doing this, your proportions relative to one another stayed pretty spot on (almost like bumper rails) and yet you could then start to take more liberties with how to express the smaller details:

- light vs. heavy shading

- smudge vs. crisp

- solid vs. wispy, etc ...

While not the fastest way to begin sketching, it gives you confidence and made me better with each one.

2. I've learned that natural forms like Human faces never have well-defined lines - otherwise it looks too cartoon-like. Whether its because of bad eye-sight :-) or the 3-dimensional view, most boundaries tend to be fuzzy, gradations of tone and soft boundaries.

3. After the rough outside boundaries of a face, I focus on the eyes first and foremost. I will obsess on building out the eyes until they "look right" to me. I won't move past this until they feel right. I've found that neglecting or deferring the sketching of the eyes ... has always resulted in a face that I wasn't happy with. I can't express it precisely, but the entire mood, expressiveness and essence of face is evoked by the way you represent the eyes of a face, human or otherwise.

4. After practicing with just pencil sketches first, I then found pastel chalks to be a fun next step to take your finger smudging and shading to a whole new level.

5. Eventually, after some practice and experience - your eye for proportion gets so good that the grid becomes mostly unnecessary. You are then able to freehand other irregular body features much better like closeups of hands and legs as well as animals in general.


To add on to #2: people are hard to draw because we instinctively recognize imperfections in other humans (maybe evolution behavior?) and can easily fall into uncanny valley when things like joints/bones don't exactly look right

FWIW, I found male faces/bodies are somewhat easier to get away imperfections since they're generally more rugged


Thanks for the core and cast shadow reference. That's something I've been struggling to figure out by eye.


A few additional points, as someone who spent several years taking courses in drawing in college.

- Don't get caught on the nerd treadmill of tools-before-effort. You can draw with whatever is in your junk drawer. You can draw well with $40 of different hardness pencils and kneaded erasers from an art supply store. Beyond that is a waste.

- As parent said, practice practice practice. Which means finding time to practice. For which a portable sketchbook and basic portable kit is a huge help.

- (Disagree with parent, here) Find someone(s) who won't hold back to judge your work. You need someone who can say (and who you can handle hearing say) "This part sucks." Because you need to hear that, and work on it, until it doesn't. In professional training this is "jury." One-directional courses (them to you) aren't going to help here, as you need feedback.

- Start drawing from life, because you have an infinite supply of content that all obeys the laws we assume to be true (perspective, lighting, gravity, etc). And you'll be able to tell if it looks correct or not.

- Drawing from pictures can help "freeze" a moment. This is especially important for outdoor light and shadow, as otherwise the sun angle will change while you're working.

- Learn to draw what you see, not a representation of what you see. This means don't draw a symbol of a house, but draw the house in front of you. Focusing on details and working through them methodically helps avoid symbolism. E.g. draw that line, or that corner, not the whole thing.

- Draw with intent: every drawing should have a concrete goal when you're learning. It doesn't have to include everything. Consider including or excluding lighting and shadow, which takes a huge amount of time to get right. E.g. circular mass studies, perspective line work, proportion. Think about what you want in this drawing, and then practice only that.

- Find an art buddy or community. This is the opposite of jury! ;) Where you go when you're feeling like your work sucks and you'll never be good, and they'll remind you of all the ways you're awesome.

Edit: 110% agree with sibling comment re: grids for proportion work, when you're learning. Inability to maintain proportion across the work is a huge source of beginner "doesn't look right"ness. Eventually you'll internalize it, and get better at relative proportion with other things in the drawing, but they're a good crutch to start with.


Awesome list, thanks


For me, it was really stumbling onto Feng Zhu's channel that changed things: https://www.youtube.com/user/FZDSCHOOL/videos The big change is more at a metacognitive level, which was to understand that you could view 'art' purely as a technical field, not something that involved artistic sense or talent. So he goes other detail density distribution, color theory, perspective, etc. The video content also helps getting a morale boost to grind through the exercises.

I would say you would not really benefit from actual dedicated courses for the first 2 years (assuming you practice with hobby-time and not full time); you have so much to learn that y ou will do big progress just doing standard exercises. Dedicated tutoring is good, but it's probably easier to get decent feedback IRL as opposed to online courses (unless you pay a fortune, it's easier to get advice from good local artists). James Gurney and Nathan Fowkes are great references.

(For reference I post some of my stuff here: https://twitter.com/wooliondraws I'm not close to any mastery, but given the amount of time I can sink into this hobby since 2015, I'm now fairly happy.).

Although there's no miracle: FZD school claims to bring people from beginner to pro-level in 3 years, but at the price of heart attacks at 30 years old for some of them.


His episode 89 - Just Draw - was so useful to me: https://youtu.be/WLqWX7onVmU


I would legit save up enough money to attend FZD if it was in the United States. I work as a Site Reliability Engineer and can afford the cost, ha.


Because of the added cost of living in Singapore? With a European salary it is unfortunately impossible to afford the cost, so it is nice to have it as a possibility.


Because I am not sure I can just up and move to Singapore due to tax reasons with working for a U.S. based company, unfortunately.


Charles Bargue's Drawing Course ("cours de dessin" - it's a book) is a classic from the 1800s. It's also in the public domain!

https://archive.org/details/C.BargueDrawingCourse/page/n23/m...

The idea is to slowly progress through the book by copying each plate accurately (the sizes are scaled down in book form, so zoom in!). I found it very effective for practicing lines, tones, and form. It's nice to pick up fundamentals first before delving deeper into a specific style.

And the #1 most important thing is to just draw as much as you can. There are tons of before-and-afters on social media where people with awful beginner drawings have shown that they can improve to become very good artists by simply practicing a lot. Much of drawing is raw mechanical precision - and it can and must be trained like any other physical skill.


Went ahead and purchased the book used. Thanks!


This was my introduction to drawing. You will not be disappointed. Drawing from Bargue's lithographs will teach you technique, and taste.


Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain is the holy grail. I don't think you'll find a much better single "diy" resource. I don't think you need to follow it cover to cover, but it's a great reference resource to have and contains a lot of super valuable exercises and resources for drawing "the right way".

Honestly, I wouldn't spend money on instruction unless it's in person - drawing is ultimately about seeing and it's hard to instruct that online. Other tutorials/lessons tend to be about copying existing work rather than drawing from life, which is the foundation of all drawing/art skills.

Learn about the basic elements of art (line, shape, color, value, form, texture, and space) and the principles of design (balance, contrast, emphasis, movement, pattern, rhythm, unity) and look up exercises to practice them all.

Most people only care about "line" when drawing (forced perspective, outlining the subjects, etc). This is a trap. Think about "drawing through the object" (don't outline and then fill in later, etc) and utilizing all the other elements of art.

Draw still life setups/landscapes/people from real life. A lot. Do long drawing sessions (4+ hours with the same subject). Short time boxed ones (15 mins max, 30 mins max, etc). Draw the same setup every day for a week. Draw every day.

If you want to copy other works, start with copying drawings/sketches from the "masters".

If possible, find a group drawing class to get IRL feedback.

Once you do this for a year or two you should have a pretty good foundation for pretty much any drawing/painting discipline.

Ultimately it's about repeated practice. Make it a daily habit and you'll see big improvements.

Source: art school, drawing/painting for 15 years.


Seconded. In still a terrible artist/sketcher, but thats due more to a lack of practice at this point.


Came to say this too. Had so much fun going through that book. Definitely check it out.


Humans are hard to sketch because your eyes / brain are really good at seeing humans.

Its one of the reasons why people draw monsters (or furries) as they get started. You can make bad proportions, and if your brain doesn't recognize it as "human", your brain is far more forgiving.

"Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain" is what worked for me, at least at a basic level. I think the "upside down human" and "upside down face" drawing exercises really worked for me.

After that, its just sitting down and taking the time to draw. As a beginner, you'll have to spend hours to master the strokes of the pencil to make something look kinda-sorta not that good. While a true expert will be able to sketch something quickly in far shorter time.

Just accept the fact that drawing/sketching will take much longer for you (because you're still a beginner), and work at it repeatedly. Over time, things get faster and faster.

------------

Landscapes are probably better to start off on, if you really want landscapes. Most humans don't see the errors in landscapes, so you can "Bob Ross" it to some extent. (All "mistakes" can be turned to look like something different)


People and landscapes are quite different things, maybe pick one and focus on that.

It also depends a lot on what you want to achieve (for example, do you want to draw people in a comic-like art style, or do quick sketches of people on the subway, or do anatomically correct nude drawings). Based on that, you can try to find a book or course that fits you. There's a lot on youtube, I would recommend that over a book today, as you get different angles and the process of doing it much better.

For good and extensive free anatomy lessons, check out Proko on Youtube. There are also "timed life drawing" or "timed gesture drawing" videos which will show you a sequence of nude/non-nude poses with a timer for quickly sketching. You should check out some gesture drawing instructions, e.g. by Proko, before that though, otherwise it might be intimidating.

If you want a more comic book like approach, check out David Finch on Youtube.

Good instruction books for most beginners are Andrew Loomis' books. He was a classical advertising artist.

Books on "urban sketching" can also be helpful, because they are based on doing things quickly and without too many tools. On Youtube, you can check out TeohYiChie, he has plenty of Urban Sketching videos, in a beautiful but very loose style that is inviting to imitate.

And the most important thing is of course to just do it and do it.


I tried a number of approaches, books, class rooms, DIY, etc. Honestly the only thing that really helped me get over the hump was simply practicing all the basics i've learned over and over again.

Doing nothing but exercises is not very fun so take the things you want to draw like people and landscapes and just get to work. You will probably be unsatisfied with your results but keep the fundamentals in mind and keep practicing.

This isn't a satisfactory answer but I think people who advocate for one basic creative program over another just found some fundamentals that clicked for them.


It will definitely come to this eventually, even if OP does find some good teaching resources.

Here's what I've heard from artists: there's always a stage where you hate they piece, and you just have to push through (goes for writing too). Just push through, remind yourself no one else ever has to see it, and you'll get better with each one.


I’ve been steadily drawing for the past 3 years. Slowly improving, what boosted my skills the most was getting an online instructor from a site that mostly facilitated language learning. Mostly because talking with real people about process, what you are working on, things where you might be struggling. My instructor help me pass those obstacles.

Draw a box drained my love got drawing and painting. I found it very repetitive and painful. The teacher warns for that, but still it didn’t work for me.

I do daily line-of-action.com sessions, it forces you not to think but to draw. Capturing essence and intent is more important than realism for me.

Just draw! Find people who inspire you. Don’t dwell on instagram and ArtStation. Perhaps take a look ob meetup if there are “shut up abd draw” sessions in your area.


Copying an old comment: "The New Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain: A Course in Enhancing Creativity and Artistic Confidence" by Betty Edwars.

She taught drawing classes and discovered that one reason why people is bad at drawing is that they symbolize what they see before drawing it. For example, when we see a face, we tend to focus on the eyes and mouth and ignore other features like the front. That contributes to a distorted representation that is reflected in the drawing.

She devised a series of exercises to avoid that problem. For example, try to draw a picture upside down, or try to draw an object shape using negative space (you focus on the shapes outside the object).


seconding this; a few years ago, I took a week-long course based on it, which worked way better than I expected. Before, I was at level of 5-yr old drawing stick figures; on the final day, I drew a portrait which looked like something you can get from a street artist.


Two suggestions to add to the many excellent ones already here:

Arthur Wesley Dow’s Composition: A Series of Exercises Selected From a New System of Art Education [0] is a wonderful, wonderful book in the public domain – recently submitted here but didn't get much attention. It is well worth spending a lot of time studying its exercises and examples.

[0] https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/dow-composition/

My second suggestion is more general but it worked wonders for me. I had a teacher years ago whose take-home assignments consisted of extremely rudimentary drawing exercises, starting with drawing a series of straight lines in parallel across a page, then moving on to squares, circles etc but always basic geometric shapes. His point was that drawing is, at its most basic level, a physical skill like many others which require physical and neurological adaptations that can only be improved with practice. In addition to the creating these lines and shapes, one was obliged to pay strict attention to their relation to other marks on the page – your circles could not overlap, for example, and your straight lines must run parallel and start and end at the same page border. The lines had to start and end very definitely at the correct point. He was also keen to examine and correct each student's physical stance in relation to the easel, the light, and the subject, and insisted we draw from the shoulder, not the elbow or wrist, as much as possible. The goal was to train one's whole body to gain full control over where the instrument marks the page.

For some students this practically remedial approach seemed almost insulting and a few would balk at it, but it was just incredible how much even very mediocre drafting skills improved when these exercises were applied diligently, including my own. I'm sorry that I don't know a name for this pedagogical system or a book that explains it.


More archive.org versions (easily downloadable in many formats): https://archive.org/search.php?query=Arthur+Dow+Composition


I would second Dow's book. Dow started teaching and his books were written after he had some years of teaching experience. I think that Georgia O'Keefe among many others, praised his instruction.


I would highly recommend drawabox.com. I used this system to get from no drawing experience to sufficient. I especially appreciate the focus on learning how to learn how to draw and not just the mechanics of drawing.


Take a sketching class in a formal academic setting.

Through a community college art department for example.

Not at a local recreation center for counter example.

More fleshed out take a sketching class for a grade. A class where you will be told whether you are failing or successful. Where there is homework.

A setting where there is accountability will force the habit of multi-hour blocks of sketching.

And a setting where it becomes socially safe to spend time sketching. Safe to take sketching seriously.

Most importantly safe to take sketching seriously for a few months even though you are terrible at it.

The only way to get better at sketching is to sketch badly and be ok with yourself about it.

Good luck. You have decades to get better.


My suggestion is to follow Kimon Nicolaides' "The natural way to draw" It's almost the antithesis of Betty Edwards' "Drawing on right side of the brain". Follow the exercises as if you were doing push-ups. At some point you'll probably want to get a model, spend your money on that.


Came to suggest this even though i am not an artist. When i wanted to learn "professional" drawing a while ago, i was recommended this.


Google: Force Drawing.

It teaches 3 critical drawing things 1) think in terms of lines.

2) every line is in relation to something (sometimes just the frame). An example of (2) would be, in the face, there is lot of relation between horizontal and vertical (relation to the frame) and for example, the eyes are in relation which each other via an expression, so you better draw them together, with one stroke to start with. Thats the point of relations: draw them at once or one after the other.

And 3) notice the diagonals and horizontal/vertical in your drawing.


Agree 100% with another comment posted in the thread - just do it. I have looked at different resources. Video series or a book both take many hours to complete. Hours which I could have spent drawing rather than just passively consuming content.

For me it works to draw what is constantly on my mind. It could be some thoughts about latest DC movie, a tv series or something going on in the news. Then I try to envision a background for example in case of Ukrain invasion, I am currently thinking of dark grey buildings in the background with smoke and ash falling from sky (scene could be inspired from something else like Chernobyl tv series). Then I introduce some story element since the point of sketch is to tell a story. I'll have a character in the foreground. That character can be sitting alone with a dog or with his/her partner to evoke feeling of tragedy and yet some hope.

In this way the thing which I sketch will be unique. It's hard to draw everything from scratch. So I think of the line from inception movie - never copy entire areas. Copy only small details like a lamp-post or a building or lighting. So I use any reference image to draw that particular detail. Even professional artists do that. Also, I post my work on instagram, this gives a finishing line otherwise I am never happy with what I have drawn.


You may not be into comics but I still recommend Lynda Berry’s Making Comics for the aspiring draftsman. Depending on how you best learn, it may be a good fit. Playful, yet structured. So much in the early stages is about overcoming inhibitions and “just do it”, and this book helps with that. Also recommend Gary Panter’s 10 “rules” for keeping a sketchbook. Have fun! Oh, and look up the urban sketchers community, might have some good hints.


https://web.archive.org/web/20160201220407/http://unbored.ne...


I want to learn how to do Stick Figures. Sort of like the xkcd.

Would "Making Comics" help with that? If not, if anyone has any resources for stick figures, please mention them in a reply to this post.


Indirectly, yes. Even if you just want to draw stick figures, you need to put marks on paper (or tablet, but the analog way has benefits IMO), and the book helps with that. You’ll need to practice abstraction and that’s nothing more than seeing and drawing. A lot. Check out the Gary Panter link above. Fill a sketchbook with stick figure versions of the stuff around you and you’re off to a good start.


(I'm a professional dev/devops but have been drawing a long time)

Lynda Barry's resources are excellent! Her "What It Is" clearly communicates the magic and identity of making marks on the the page. She shows her adoration of marks by NOT-trained artists, they're more "alive", so many of her exercises are UN-learning things from more traditional "artist" pathways.

I'm really enjoying her "Syllabus" book, it's a startling refreshing way to learn, including making marks / "drawing".

https://www.instagram.com/thenearsightedmonkey/

https://www.amazon.com/Syllabus-Accidental-Professor-Lynda-B...

https://www.amazon.com/What-Lynda-Barry/dp/1897299354


If you want the absolute best online drawing class try Vitruvian studios Drawing Basics. It literally starts with how to hold a pencil. If you want to jump straight into portraiture David and Mindy have a portrait class starting in March. Their zoom classes are low stress, funny , you learn so much, and at the end you have an amazing portrait that you can’t believe you actually drew yourself. They are two working artists from Chicago, check them out. https://vitruvianstudio.com/course/drawing-basics/ https://vitruvianstudio.com/live-streaming-classes/


You Can Draw in 30 Days: The Fun, Easy Way to Learn to Draw in One Month or Less

by Mark Kistler

This was great.


I second this! Even though I didn’t get very far with the book (got distracted, stopped practicing, forgot to go back to it) it definitely helped me get better at perspective and shading.


There are a lot of decent books out there and obviously a million good online resources, but I think if you're looking for a starting point, I'd suggest you look for classes at a local community college or atelier. Avoid anything that looks too "artsy". Self expression is great but find somebody who will teach you how to draw. An atelier would be an ideal option as they tend to have very good technical instruction and you can avoid forming bad habits early on.

It's very doable to do it yourself, but having somebody there to show you when you're screwing up is immensely valuable. Once you've got the basics and know how to learn then you can take more time to study on your own.


Oh, I never imagined you'd have a hn profile. When I started learning your "Don’t go to art school" post was also quite an inspiration to learn diligently. I had spent one year in art school which was the most useless I ever had and disgusted me of art for quite a few years (and made me switch permanently to math/CS).


Art school can really suck the joy out of art. Not always, of course, but it's so sad when it does.

Hope you found a way to still do art on your own!


I have been looking but coming up short. If anyone knows such schools or artists in Austin, Texas that they'd recommend feel free to reply in a comment.


Just took a quick look and this one looks very good: https://www.atelierdojo.com/


Yep I have already emailed them for more info! Hopefully they have weekend classes...


Good luck! Art is a hell of a fun pursuit and I hope you have a good time with it. The long periods of boredom and frustration lead to those moments of bliss as you make things you're proud of and you start to understand what you're doing.

It's an endless road but it's a damn fun one.


The best art instruction I ever found was when I took a portraiture class and an anatomy class through the local art shop, though I don't think anything can replace just doing it all the time. Much like fishing and software development, there's a million schools of thought on how to do it the right way. If you can find one of them that jives with you, it can be great, but you can spend a decade searching for a perfect method and never find it.

One of my favorite artists, Stanislav Krawczyk (instagram.com/standarkart), has cerebral palsy and creates fantastic portraits. It's not because he can make a perfect line, but he knows where to put the lines he can make.


When I want to sketch something in pencil, I draw a fibonacci spiral, choose two to three points on it to be the boundary of the object I want to draw, and then start filling it in. It's surprisingly effective.


You don't need anything to learn to sketch from scratch. Just start sketching and keep at it. Think about it, even children can do it. Perseverance is the key. Now if you want to improve, refine your skill, etc, then you may need help. But not to start sketching from scratch.

People use "material" as a crutch sometime. Once I buy the new sneakers then I can start exercising, once I get new laptop then I can start programming, once I get some money, I can start living, etc. You can start anytime you want.

I'm not judging. I do it all the time myself.


Learning to draw and paint (painting is just drawing with paint in a way) the process is exactly like training AI to do anything. You put into your head all these rules and examples (books about art, images that you like etc) and set off. By setting off I mean daily - or more likely throughout the day - doodling and sketching whatever takes your fancy. Yes like training AI models the outputs at first are weird, but you keep the bits that look good and ignore the weird bits you dont want. Iterate and repeat. There are no magic shortcuts, you have to do the work of doing drawing but most importantly (in my opinion) dont throw away all your failures, keep them so you can see how far you’ve come. You have to be prepared also to let go all the notions of consciously learning how to do it, like learning to code for example. You have to let the model keep iterating. I still do a daily sketch (in pencil - simple lines) every day and when I can a painting. Eventually you train the bits of your brain that are involved and those rules get embedded. Now when I do a painting I dont have to think about the rules, they have been hard coded in some algorithm that I cant possibly understand but works. Even I am often amazed at what comes out. @chloegilbertartist on Instagram for some examples. You can see how things vary there, I’m still training the model ;)


From personal experience, the most important thing is to do it every day. 15-20 minutes is enough. Your brain will work on technique issues overnight. The jump in skill after 30 days of daily sketching can be substantial.

With respect to drawing people, viewers respond strongly to particular parts being "wrong", so break the learning process down into parts. For example, focus on over-all proportions, then focus on hands and wrists, then on faces, and then feet. Then put all of it together.


Get a stylus for your phone - if you don't have a phone that supports pressure, don't worry, just get the best capacitive stylus brands(I use Meko mesh tips). The learning goal here does not involve quality media.

Then use your downtime to trace photos. When you feel more ambitious, hide the original and draw from recollection, or try to modify elements - say, adjust proportions or give figures different clothing or merge multiple photos into one image. Aim to simplify your traces. Try using different brushes and drawing programs. Trace in different ways, e.g. by looking for the lighting values rather than contours, or by trying to reveal underlying forms by seeing "behind" the object with cross-sectional lines.

This is a relaxing way to approach drawing. It gives you a pleasing result immediately and lets you study subjects of your choosing. You are starting from a point of maximal accuracy. You don't have to run out and get a "setup", because everyone has their phone with them anyway and there are plenty of good apps. It lets you experiment and build up mileage across a variety of skills. You can adjust the difficulty as you like by trying relatively more or less difficult things.

When you feel ready to explore the technical aspects further, try Drawabox. You don't have to do the full course, just trying every exercise in Lesson 1 once is a good study on its own. Drawabox, being so completely focused on technical skills, is known as a morale-crusher and one of its admonishments is to use a "50% rule" where you are spending half of your art time on things other than the exercises so that you don't burn out from hours and hours of drawing abstract shapes. That's why you should figure out the fun parts first.


Blind contour drawings of something in your house every day for 20 minutes for three months. Do that and you’ll be better at drawing than most people


You might try drawabox.com; I found it pretty decent. Construction-based approach.


Looks like a great start to what I'm after will give it a shot thanks!


I really liked Drawing By Seeing by John Torreano when I picked it up in college: https://www.amazon.com/Drawing-Seeing-Abrams-Studio-Torreano...

Thanks for this thread! I’ve been meaning to ask around for recommendations like this for a while now.


It's an older book, but I remember getting a lot out of Adrian Hill's How to Draw when I read it many years ago. Probably out-of-print, but cheap second-hand copies are around.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1471816.How_To_Draw


I read and drew alongside Harold Speed's The Practice & Science of Drawing. It was a decent enough start, but, as with any art, resources pale in comparison to dedicated practice. Also, a community of likeminded creatives that are organized, dedicated, productive, and hopefully talented, stands much closer to dedicated practice than it does to resources.


Look for didactic materials and approaches used by the French Academic painters of the nineteenth century. A good book about the sight-size technique of drawing and painting should be a useful toolset for someone engineering-minded. There are books published within the last 20 years on this approach, and there are thousands of living competent practitioners in the real world.

There are methods of examining and translating our physiological visual experience into an abstraction we call a "drawing" that were developed over hundreds of years. They are very good methods. Don't be intimidated by their age or some imagined importance of an old approach. Anyone can learn to draw given the correct system of reasoning and evaluation.

All that said, don't waste time on anything you do not think is beautiful or inspiring.

Finally, nude figure classes are a great challenge and motivator.


If you are looking for realism, the single best advice I can give is that you need to practice drawing what you see vs what you think you see. Humans think in terms of icons and memes, but resist the urge.

When you see a nose on a face, you'll want to draw an icon of a nose, with an outline. But resist, and really look at what you're seeing. A camera or a printer doesn't draw a nose, it prints a series of consecutive values that look exactly like a nose, and so should you. Outlining should be for reference and nothing else.

If you get into the world of color, the same thing happens. When it comes time to color skin, for example, you go reaching for the meme color of skin. But really look at it; you're a camera. That skin right there actually has blue in it. And yellow. And red. Stop seeing what you think you see, and see what is actually there.


https://drawabox.com/


Robert Laszlo Kiss on YouTube is very good. You gotta know the basics of perspective (single point, two point ans three point perspective) to advance in drawing / painting. Everything is a box in perspective. Then you fill in the details from there.


My sister is a talented artist but I’m complete garbage. When we were young, we drew completely differently. I drew whatever I felt like. She always drew the exact same dog. Over and over, thousands of times, for years. Whenever we’d go into a restaurant, she’d flip the placemat over and draw the exact same dog. Over and over again.

It got to a point that I knew what lines she was going to put next, but though I knew how to construct the dog, it never looked quite right. It’s like I draw the recognizable part of a dog. She draws a dog.

If I wanted to get really good at sketching in a hurry, I’d do exactly what my sister did and fill notebooks of the same exact picture.

(Just not of that dog. I’m sick of that fucking dog…) :)


On Wondrium.com (used to be The Great Courses). They have a course I have been taking and love it. I was an aspiring artist but I dropped out of the pursuit for many years. Recently I got the itch to draw more seriously than a rare doodle. I find their How to Draw course is perfect in content and style (https://www.wondrium.com/how-to-draw . I think you can get a 14 day trial for Wondrium to try it, which is what I did.

However, I keep renewing my sub because there are tons of great courses. Good luck! -KC


On Wondrium.com (used to be The Great Courses). They have a course I have been taking and love it. I was an aspiring artist but I dropped out of the pursuit for many years. Recently I got the itch to draw more seriously than a rare doodle. I find their How to Draw course is perfect in content and style (https://www.wondrium.com/how-to-draw . I think you can get a 14 day trial for Wondrium to try it, which is what I did.

However, I keep renewing my sub because there are tons of great courses. Good luck! -KC


If you live in a city, take an in-person class. Several studios near me offer 3-4 hour introduction to pencil drawing classes. It'll save you a couple months of struggling to have an actual artist there telling you the trick to doing it right.


Someone once gave me a surprising recommendation for learning how to sketch: "How to Draw Comics the Marvel Way."

It moves fast and gives you some genuinely useful quick tips on how to get started. (Like looking for ways to envision real-life objects as cubes and cylinders, as a way of easily capturing the three-dimensionality of what you're sketching.)

I mean, the best advice is usually to just spend lots of time practicing the thing you're trying to learn. What's good about this book is it encourages you to dive and try its various exercises - which could get you into doing some sketching in a fun and quirky way.


Honestly, practice practice practice. Don’t try to make that one perfect drawing, make hundreds average ones. The most difficult skill is not how to render the perfect line or gradient but to really “see” what is in front of you and not fill in the gaps.

Photos are nice, I like the website line of action if you want to learn to draw people. Try to draw from real life as much as possible. Draw what is at you desk, your family, people around you in a café. It is much more difficult at the start, but you will progress so much faster.

Also, is there anyone with good recommendations to learn more about (modern) art and art history?


Not for learning, but for practice I made this little site:

https://daily-drawing-prompt.vercel.app/

It gives you a daily drawing prompt to practice.


Look at the book Drawing Space, Form, and Expression by Entice and Peters. Its ideas are extremely deep and insightful. Some nice practical advise too. It's not for everyone, though.


Started maybe 4 years ago wanting to make art for a video game. I took the Hunter S Thompson approach - he typed word for word I think TS Elliot. Traced what i liked eventually took it more serious. Draw once a day - doodles & no expectations. I liked NMA's Steve Huston sketchbook class, but really no one can draw for you. Stefan Baumann has some coaching sessions but that's for oil painting. Finding someone local to give coaching might help. cheers & good luck


I particularly like Sinix (https://www.youtube.com/user/sinixdesign). Although he primarily does digital painting, there's always a drawing which forms the foundation of any painting.

He also has all kinds of recommended other artist channels at the bottom of his Youtube page, and they're all fantastic. Some use traditional media vs digital, some paint vs focus on drawing.


https://artwod.com/

Beginner course is well structured with oversight and focuses on building blocks


I recommend looking to see if there's a nearby art school and whether it will let you audit Drawing 101/102 classes or enroll in a non-credit program. I did this about 15 years ago and it was amazing to have in-person instruction and to be in a class with people who also were learning. My skills progressed much farther than I suspected they would over the course of 18 months of taking classes.


If you're OK with an offline option, check with your nearest community college, or local equivalent. They often have cheap or free art classes, including sketching, available to the public.

Maybe also check with art schools. Years ago, my mother wanted to learn oil painting and one of the big schools in Manhattan hooked her up with a woman in her neighborhood that offered one-on-one and small group classes.


Best way to improve at drawing is to go to a life drawing class.

Most cities have them on on the evening. Community centers, universities, art colleges. Most very affordable to attend. And it's not as awkward as you'd expect.

You'll need to take: Lots of BIG (A3 at least) sheets paper Low density drawing charcoal And or 4B pencil Putty rubber Some way of clipping or sticking paper to a board (probably provided)


Nintendo Art Academy is excellent. Really does a fantastic job of helping you learn how to draw from a very basic level.


I checked out Scott robertsons “how to draw” at the library and I think it is really good.

However, my main takeaway was that my desire to draw was not big enough for the effort required.

http://scottrobertsonworkshops.com/h2dr/


https://www.21-draw.com/ has been advertised to me a few times. I've been very tempted to get a membership and put some focused practice in. They mostly focus on digital art though.


I can't draw at all. Skills stopped evolving at age 6 :P Is it really something you can learn, or do you think there is some pre-requisite innate "gift"? I can't get my head around it.


Myron Barnstone has a great series on the topic. Some of his stuff is on YouTube.


Rapid Viz by Kurt Hanks is a great book. It was a textbook when I was doing industrial design courses a long time ago. I think I have the first edition, but it looks like the third is available on Amazon.


honestly? just start drawing from life every single day. then do some referenced imaginative drawing, e.g; redraw the subject of your life drawings from a few different angles/with different simple lighting setups from your head, try to replicate the rendering style of an artist or painting that you like. supplement this study with ONE anatomy resource and ONE perspective resource and maybe one dynamic drawing resource [scott robertson's how to draw, peter han drawing courses] if you are going to invest money into anything, maybe buy a nice plaster cast, an ecorche figure and a simple lighting setup. try to find figure drawing sessions in your area that you can attend. as you become comfortable with drawing simple indoor subjects, start doing some plein air studies as well.

imo pretty much all the anatomy and perspective books are more or less equal, they are all using different methods to get to the same place, so just look at some pictures and choose the style that makes the most sense to you. personally i like zarins and was very impressed by scott eaton's courses. the most important thing is to simply draw as much as possible even if your output is utter garbage [and no matter how devastating producing garbage is to your ego], no book and no amount of money can do that part for you. similar to language acquisition, the most effective way to build drawing skills in a short amount of time is through pure immersion; turning drawing, like speaking into a natural extension of your everyday life. find ways to incorporate your life into drawing and you will get good.

with that said, these are the resources that helped me out the most in the beginning, plus a few that i wish i had read much earlier

http://www.huevaluechroma.com

https://imgur.com/gallery/Wia19

Alla Prima: Everything I Know about Painting by Richard Schmid

Graphic LA by Robh Ruppel

How to See Color and Paint It by Arthur Stern

Rendering in pen and ink by Arthur Leighton Guptill

https://www.heavypaint.com


Mark Kistler’s Draw Squad if you’d like to try a book.


You could see projection types or technical drawing books/methods.

I suck at drawing 3D with perspective, but with a cheap isometric projection you can draw open spaces fairly easy (ofc there are more perspectives, but for game map sketching, its pretty useful). The main benefit is that you have measured AXIS, so if you dont have the skill to draw a 3D stair, just remember that its a slope between a perpendicular plane.

You can draw 3D functions/shapes this way. There are special methods for some shapes. https://www.compuphase.com/axometr.htm

You could make it even more cheap by using aproximations to the isometric perspective (ex: use 30° from the horizontal line) and rejecting realist proportions: 1) Grab a square grid paper 2) Set a center point, this will be (0,0) 3) Draw a line segment from (0,0) to (2,1), this is your X axis. 4) Repeat the same for the other direction, the Y axis, from (0,0) to (-2,1). Now you have an horizontal plane. 5)Draw a vertical line from (0,0) to (0,2), for the Z vertical axis This is the "cheap" iso projection.

TL;DR When you have Axis, measures and ratios are your friends.


Drawing skill, in my experience, comes mainly down to natural talent. If you’ve not got much you’ll get little reward from investing your time.


Boo. Everything I've learned, from work to living like an adult, has come down to practice. If I thought it was just "natural talent" I'd never attempt to get better at anything.


People like to credit their own hard work. You’ll never seen a winning athlete say how talented they are. We’ve created an an illusion that anyone can excel with hard work because it justifies inequalities. I was born good at drawing stuff so I capitalised on it somewhat.


What is your experience when it comes to drawing?


Trace images using Tracing paper


Possible red flags:

- "One day, eventually, if all the stars align, I want to maybe be able to X" pattern. Yes it's good to have goals, and socially approved of to be humble; a risk with this is that people who are compelled to do X are already doing it right now, badly, because they enjoy doing it. You could have drawn many people in the time it took you to write that post, and then said "draw better action scenes with people fighting" or "more realistic faces" or etc. Something specific. The possible red flag is: "I want to be in a band" imagining being on stage and being worshipped, instead of "I strum on the guitar and enjoy it and want to be able to play Stairway to Heaven". If by any chance you don't like the action of drawing already right now, why will you want to draw people later if you have the ability? What will change?

- You want to draw "people or landscapes". Also good to have goals and range, but possible red flag is that the goals are suspiciously vague. Could it be that you don't know what you want because you don't really want to do either of those things very much? Would you know if you wanted to draw wooden furniture that you are planning to make, or illustrations for a nightmare Lovecraft book? Instead of "I want to play Stairway to Heaven on the electric guitar" you're saying "I want to do music or singing is there a good tutorial for that?". What specific people are you drawn to? Portraits? Action movements? Cartoon style? Anime style? DC Comics style? Or what landscapes? Like Bob Ross, Bill Watterson, Studio Ghibli, or what? If you don't know and don't care, it's back to liking the idea more than the activity. If you do care, maybe choosing and focusing can give you something specific to look for in a tutorial - no point in getting one that covers hands if you want to draw mountains, no point in one which covers plants in detail if you want to draw steampunk, just because you'll be more compelled to work on things you want to work on.

- "I tried X and it didn't work". Yes guides and tutorials and things can help, red flag interpretation is also that's is such a vague comment. "I want to build websites. I tried 'Javascript the good parts' but it didn't work" as if the book 'worked' you'd be able to code and if you can't code after reading it, the book didn't work. As if working is a thing books can do or not do. Did it not give you anything to think about? Anything to practise? Did you do the self portrait at the start and end and not improve?

- "I am willing to pay hudreds of dollars" - Is that coming from a place of "expertise and coaching is something I respect" or from "can I skip the hard and boring bits by throwing money at it?". Only you can know.

- Analysis paralysis. I understand it, and I suspect a common reason for it is that people "want" to do things, but don't really want to, so there's nothing to force any action one way or another. Consider: do you want cake or ice cream? Hard decision. Do you want cake or dog poop? Easy decision. People who "want to write games" can't decide on the "best way" for months at a time. People who are compelled to get their game idea into reality have no time for analysis paralysis, any tutorial will do, get to the point already, I've got things to create! There's no analysis paralysis in "I want to plant potatoes in my garden this growing season and that gives me 2 weeks and there's one garden center near by". There's analysis paralysis in "growing some of my own food would be nice, but what? should I get an allotment? What's the perfect soil? Which online shop has the ~ best seeds ~? What tools do the pros use? What's the best gardening TV show?".

Do you want to spend your time doing the activity of drawing? Is that something you already do, now? If yes, it makes it much easier: look for the courses which teach the thing you want to improve at, specifically. If no, maybe do that first or ask yourself why you "want to be able to draw" when you don't ever draw?

This post brought to you by years of watching people say "I want to learn to program, what would be the best way(tm)" on the internet, when they could be opening an editor and fighting the parser to get some code working, any code. Paradox: If you don't care what you draw, any tutorial will do. If you do care, there should be little analysis paralysis because most tutorials are irrelevant to what you want, and of all the ones which are targetted at what you want, any one of them will do.


I mean, I agree with all your points, but red flags for what? I want to learn how to draw and am willing to invest resources to do it. Currently going through the free drawabox.com lessons and that seems to have all the exercises and videos I need to get going.


nothing terribly concrete and specific; red flags that the author (you) might be approaching it out of a panicky midlife crisis desire to achieve something, anything, to fill a hole in their soul or a desire that people would respect them more if they had more skills and achievements. X is something therefore achieve X as a checklist item to attain, even if without any particular interest in X. That the author might want to reflect on why they're looking for the best course instead of putting pencil to paper or being halfway through any course already.

The distinction between "I want to learn the basics of conversational Spanish for my holiday this summer" compared to "if I could learn another language people would like me, Spanish is supposed to be easy".

The distinction between "I want to learn to fly a helicopter and need a course which won't kill me" and "I want to learn to cook, I have a kitchen and spare food and money, and it's been years and hopefully what I need is out there somewhere I can watch or research instead of in a messy pile of ingredients in the kitchen right here".

> "Currently going through the free drawabox.com lessons and that seems to have all the exercises and videos I need to get going."

That is good. Nowhere do I mean to say "don't do it"; only to reflect that from the outside your description feels like you aren't really interested, not to tell you that you aren't or shouldn't be interested. Good luck! :)


Oh oh! I got a recommendation as someone who learnt how to draw from scratch using online resources only. It does however break your requirement of using something like udemy.

Brent Eviston’s course, The art and science of drawing, starts from the basics of how to draw lines and moves its way through measuring, 3d forms, contours, and then into shading and finally gesture followed by full sketches. Follow it fully and you’ll have enough experience by the end of the shading course to start working on other courses too. That latter point is the best part; the fundamentals give you the ability to know how to pick up more skills from other classes.

This is how I would work through it if I was doing from scratch

Complete the basic skills class - https://www.skillshare.com/classes/Basic-Skills-Getting-Star...

Complete dynamic mark making - https://www.skillshare.com/classes/Dynamic-Mark-Making-Drawi...

Move on to 3d forms - https://www.skillshare.com/classes/Form-Space-3D-Drawing-Per...

Contours - https://www.skillshare.com/classes/Contours-Drawing-with-Com...

Measuring and proportions (this one can be done in parallel with the 3d form class once you get to chapter 6) - https://www.skillshare.com/classes/Measuring-Proportion-Draw...

At this point you can start to work through drawabox - https://drawabox.com/ . Some people recommend this as a start, but honestly, if you are starting from scratch it can be hard to know if you are doing things right. The previous courses will give fundamentals to actually enjoy drawabox

Meanwhile, keep progressing on Brent’s courses

Fundamentals of shading - https://www.skillshare.com/classes/Shading-Fundamentals-Draw...

Shading beyond basics - https://www.skillshare.com/classes/Shading-Beyond-the-Basics...

If you have time you can pick up the figure drawing in parallel since you don’t do shading at that point.

Intro to figure drawing - https://www.skillshare.com/classes/Gesture-An-Introduction-t...

Measuring for figure drawing - https://www.skillshare.com/classes/Measuring-Proportion-for-...

Finally , volumetric figure drawing - https://www.skillshare.com/classes/Volume-Structure-Learn-th...

Notably absent from all of this is landscape drawing. Landscape drawing is a different beast depending on how you want to approach it. If you just want to sketch with a pen, the skills you pick up by the time you do the measuring and proportions class of Brent’s will be enough to let you go into any city scape and observe the area and draw. Learning how to let go of certain details and add your expression is a very individual choice so at that point, you can look out for certain artists and study their work to choose what works for you.

Also notably absent from all of this is colour. That’s because colour doesn’t matter without fundamental understanding of form and light in black and white. For this, there are many amazing courses in proko’s online library. Marco Bucci has amazing material. And if you want to do digital painting, Ahmed Aldoori has a lot of stuff.

Basically after you pick up the fundamentals, the choice of courses opens up and each course will teach something new. But without those fundamentals, the value of those classes is hard to absorb.

Feel free to mail me if you want more info or want to chat :)


Learning how to draw, sharing your work, outgrowing realism taking to impressionism, pop surrealism, is such a critical part of out growing up, that if bad advice knocks it out of you, you'll end up with a hole in your soul.

People will comment that I am making assumptions, and snipe everything in here, but be strong, do what I tell you, because even YOUR first impression may be wrong.

I give you, and all the kind people that read this, Hyper Realism, as your first step.

Because making a perfect portrait is the simplest thing you can do.

Before you draw, before you get your pencils, your easel, before it occurs to you to get a wall projector (a modern camera obscura):

download Krita!

And buy the cheapest pen ant tablet you can get (about $40). Don't use the mouse, because it does not have a pressure sensor.

That is what the pen is for, the tip is pressure sensitive, and allows you to lay down transparent layers of paint.

If all you have is a mouse at the moment, then that is OK for following these steps. But get the pen, a mouse is nothing like it. Warning: the mouse may trick you into thinking digital painting is not for you, buy a used pen.

Before I continue, I remind you all, that as you learn how to do this one simple trick, you must become teachers. This is the tradition of the programmer, you learn and you teach the little ones how to do it. They won't learn in school, schools, like bad advice, will trick the younger artist out of art.

(Critics, keep in mind that this is teaches about drawing, it helps the heart to art, this is sacred, just let it be. And remember how internet works, one person asks, but the response is for many. I know the person asked for drawing and not digital painting. This teaches pencil drawing too.)

Once you have krita (which is open source) installed create 15x15 inch 300 dpi canvas.

Go to https://www.reddit.com/r/redditgetsdrawn/ and pick a simple well lit face, make sure you can see the lip/eye details at 1:1 zoom, though a little bit of blur won't hurt you, as you have to paint many paintings to to learn how to draw.

Now, and this is the magical part, use the Reference Images Tool (pushpin icon) to load up the image from Reddit Gets Drawn, AND STRETCH IT OVER THE ENTIRE CANVAS. This will feel like tracing, people may call it tracing, but this is learning to draw for real. This is about discovering the details of the face.

Begin by setting the opacity of the reference image to 50% and rough out the details, the shape of the face, the location of the eyes, assign a shortcut to CTRL+` to "Show Reference Images" which will help you turn the reference image off and on. This is your CAMERA OBSCURA, here you get everything in place for your Hyper Realism.

Once you have your shapes figured out, preferably on separate layers, DROP THE REFERENCE IMAGE OPACITY TO 1%, you won't be able to see it, BUT THE COLOR PICKER WIL, Holding down the CTRL key flips your brush into color picker mode, so you pick the color and brush it on, PICK AND BRUSH IT ON, PICK AND BRUSH IT ON, PICK AND BRUSH IT ON.

As you explore this technique studying your reference image, trying different variations of the technique, YOUR BRAIN, will begin soaking up details about the face, that you never knew existed. The little puffyness near the eye, the light that is always by the cheeks, the light pink near the lips, the support shadow beneath the nose.

The more you paint, the more you will learn how to draw.

NOTES:

Reddit Gets drawn has this happy clause: "By submitting a photo, submitters are agreeing that artists can distribute and sell work based on the photos uploaded."

Be mindful of copyright look up Shepard Fairy's trouble with the Obama HOPE poster.

Search the internet for "How do I sell my digital art."

Teach others how to do this.

And finally, when I hope to teach this technique, I half-jokingly call this the Cat Pea Technique.

I arrived at it independently about three weeks ago, and I kind of captured the beginning of the light bulb going off, in a silly time lapse video of a very patient and lind lady from Reddit Gets Drawn: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ov9m1iTJgSk&list=PLOo-pqnffy...

I am not selling anything, the video has only 7 views, and no sound, use an ad blocker, etc.

I am really just giving you all the ability to learn Art VERY QUICKLY from Hyper Realistic Digital Painting, which is a very inspiring start.

I know it will work for many if not all of you, because once you finish your first work, you will never stop.

We are all artists, we just need that first taste.

Thanks for bringing this question to the front page autotune.

Take care everyone, and remember to teach others.


just........ do it!!!!!




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