Would you like to learn how to draw stunning art and start wowing everyone around you? Whether you’re drawing with a pencil for the first time, or have had years of experience, we’re sure you’ll find lots of useful tips and resources here.
Is Drawing a Gift?
For every ability, there will be individuals who exhibit an above-average natural aptitude. That can certainly happen with drawing, but by and large, any person who can write by hand can learn to draw. We will not all become major visual artists, but everyone can acquire decent skills, just like everyone can learn to swim or speak decent French, barring specific handicaps, of course. As a matter of fact, up to the early 20th century, drawing was taught in school and as a result, it was common for an educated person to draw very well. After World War I, education ‘experts’ decided that drawing was difficult and better left to the specialized training of artists. From difficult, the perception drifted to mysterious and then to impossible if you don’t have a gift for it.
How Long Does It Take to Learn to Draw?
Truly surprising results are achieved with as little as one or two hours of instruction. 40+ hours of practice following a structured, systematic method will allow you to understand and begin to work on all the skills you need in order to draw. With more practice, you will be able to integrate these elements into a whole. At that point, you are really drawing, meaning that you have the certainty that you are not lacking any special knowledge and that it is up to you. You can still make mistakes – correction: you will make mistakes – but you know how to deal with them. You feel safe handling the task. You know how to draw. The rest is a matter of practice and passion.
How to Learn to Draw: Stage One, Retrain Your Brain
If you have an interest in drawing but have been disappointed with the results of your past efforts, don’t give up just yet. It’s most likely that you have just not learned the technique that works for you.
For example, one of the main reasons that people cannot produce a realistic likeness is that they have not yet learned to really “see” exactly what they are looking at. The messages that our brain gives to us as we are drawing are actually getting in our way and not helping us at all!
You see, your brain has stored in its memory images of lips, eyes, ears, trees, cars, hands, etc. And during your drawing sessions, your brain tries to interject those images to the forefront of your memory. Most of the time, that’s what ends up in our drawings: the stored images from our brain and not the shape we are actually looking at in our reference photo.
These stored images are coming from the logical and problem-solving left hemisphere of our brain, which is usually domineering and doesn’t allow the right brain to interpret what is being perceived in a photo before the left brain “butts in” with its own advice on how to draw lips or eyes, or any other element in your photo. The left brain tries to tell us how to draw faces before we get a chance to draw our own interpretation of what we see.
For more information and a full course on how to train your brain to really “see” and therefore create realistic drawings, please see Betty Edwards’ renowned book, “Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain“. This book will sky-rocket your drawing abilities in a matter of hours – seriously!
Every other drawing instruction book mixes some of the ideas of this book – hopefully, and usually without proper acknowledgment – with the writer’s pet techniques and “cool” projects. Not one shows the same intellectual rigor, informed by practice, in weeding out the projects that are ego-driven rather than empirically justified. Many are completely useless as they show no attempt to understand the disorientation of a beginner’s mind. Many are just beautiful picture books with captions that are impossible to follow and can only reinforce the novice reader’s discouragement. “Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain” is simply the best book in existence on learning to draw.
Start Gaining the Drawing Skills You’ve Always Wanted
It is absolutely possible to learn how to draw in the space of a few weeks, simply by following a series of structured exercises framed by short lectures, demonstrations, and feedback sessions. And with the magic of the Internet, it’s entirely possible to do so while sitting comfortably at home.
Enter Jaysen Batchelor, an illustrator who has condensed his years of training and experience into an online course that will take you from the basic fundamentals of drawing all the way up to creating stunning designs and illustrations! In a short while, you’ll find yourself drawing with a confidence you never dreamt of! You don’t believe it? Judge by yourself, there is a full money-back guarantee within the first 30 days of purchasing the course.
Free Drawing Tutorials
Learn how to draw people with these free video tutorials, which teach you to draw faces, hands, eyes and more.
Drawing the Human Figure
Getting the proportions correct in your body sketching is one of the biggest challenges you will face as a novice. In this 11 minutes long drawing tutorial, learn how to draw a female body, covering basic considerations including proportions, fluid lines, shapes and poses.
Loomis’s Approach to Drawing Heads
Another terrific tutorial for beginners, this video explains how to draw the head from any angle.
Realistic Drawing of the Eyes
When you’re drawing a face, the most important feature is the eyes. Eyes are windows to the soul: they will tell you a lot about the age, expression, and personality of the subject. The following video is an excellent step-by-step instructional on drawing realistic eyes.
Learn How to Draw a Face Accurately
Get better at portraits by following Wei Ho’s step by step drawing tutorial. The easiest and most common way to draw a face is to start with an eye and “grow” the rest of the face from there.
How to Draw Hands
Many artists struggle to draw hands. After watching Jazza’s drawing tips, you will find that hands are not as hard as they may have seemed before.
