How to start drawing

How to start drawing.

The easy answer would be "just draw" and it's true. But when we enjoy a hobby, it's only natural to want to get better and to look for tips and advices. The thing with Art and the reason it's so hard to learn is because it takes A LOT of time. No matter how much you practice, it will take you YEARS to properly improve. There's no such things as gifted or shortcuts. The other reason is because Art is a very personal thing, intimate, so we all have our very personal way to practice it and most importantly to learn it. That's the first point, STOP watching tutorials online brainlessly. We'll go back to why and how to properly watch them later in this post but for now I want you to stop (especially in drawing).

Because it's so personal, there's no "secret" to be successful in no time so don't expect some genius cheat code here.

But still, there's a lot of tools to learn in a more comfortable easier way and that's what I'm going to share here, I'm not gonna teach you how to draw, I'll teach you how to learn to draw. You're not gonna draw better by the end of this post, but you'll know how to learn to do that in your own way, with you own style.

And yes the cover pic is bait because the only way to have people's attention when you want to share tips is to show your own improvement to make them think they can somehow be like you. This is the mindset we're going to try to change here.

1- The Goal

This is the first thing you need to figure out. People will tell you the most important thing when you draw is practice, it's wrong. As important as practice is, it's pointless if you can't THINK and understand what you're doing and why, so that's the first thing you're gonna do. Put down your pencil. I want you to sit alone with yourself for a while and ask yourself why you draw, why you want to draw, why you want to get better. It doesn't have to be humble, doesn't matter the idea, it will be your base because depending on what you want, you'll learn differently. My goal was to draw my fav character because nobody else would. If your goal is personal then good, you're more likely to keep going. If it's recognition or a job in something you're passionate with, you'll have to be more careful but you can do it. If you draw only to make "easy money" or to get numbers online you can stop reading right here and find another hobby you actually love. It doesn't matter what your goal is, if it's born of love you can make it, if it's not you won't have the patience to keep going. And I'm not seeing this in some childish utopist "love is power", but I'll go back to that soon.

Keep in mind that most of you won't make a living out of it also, you need to be ready to accept that. Defeat is the easiest way to grow anyway.

2- Give up on tutorials and anatomy

As dumb as it sounds, it's the most important part of learning : stop learning. If you don't like what you're doing, you'll give up. So I want you to stop right now with all the anatomic exercises and shit, you're too "young" for that. Before you dive in the technical part, you need to know what you're doing. I think it's the most (and one of the "deadliest") common mistake among beginners, wanting to be good in everything right away and so trying to learn everything at once. Don't. All you're gonna do is feeling overwhelmed by all these new informations and you won't be able to understand or remember them. When you start a new sport you don't learn pro moves just yet. If you start boxing they'll make you run first, they'll teach you cardio and stamina first, they won't go into pro moves before A WHILE. Before you run you gotta learn to walk, you get the idea. So before you start wanting to draw like a pro, you need to draw. And more importantly, you need to learn to have fun so you have the motivation to keep learning. When I was learning archery, during our first class the teacher told us every single thing we need to learn and think about and that was a lot. He then said "overwhelming, right ? That's why for now we're only gonna focus on one point and once you get it, we'll go to the next one". Basically the best way to learn is to focus on one thing, until it becomes a good enough reflex to have you do it naturally and without having to even think how to do it, like breathing, like moving any members. Then you can focus on another point. That's why I won't mention references and shit just yet, I'll keep that for another day. We're in the very first baby step of drawing here.

3- Reject perfection You will never reach perfection. Absolutly never. You need to accept and embrace your mistakes because that's how you'll notice what you like to do and what you don't and so what you're good at and what you're terrible with. From your mistakes, you will not only learn what you need to improve, you will also create your artstyle. I'm mostly known for my colors, but at some point I used to be fucking awful with it. More importantly, I used to HATE it. Before I keep going, here's a before after of my Zelda Breath of the Wild fanarts :

What you need to know here is it took me two years to make them for the first version while it took me one week to make them in my redraw. The initial point was to have something full of light, similar to a stained glass and yeah, the first version didn't even come near that goal. Revali (the bird) is the last one I did in that first version and I cried when I did. I cried because coloring it was THIS painful to me, this uncomfortable, this unpleasant. And more importantly, because it made me realize how fucking shitty I was. After that I stopped drawing for a few weeks, asking myself what I was doing, why I was pushing myself into things I hated so much. Why was I trying so hard to get a semi-realistic kind of natural colo anyway, given how I hated trying to learn it ? Because that's what people expect from me, or so I thought. And so I thought, I'm coloring like shit anyway so I'm not gonna please anyone and if I'm not pleasing anyone I might as well have fun. If I gotta flop I might as well do whatever the fuck I want and please myself instead. So I took the opposite path, since I'm so bad at pulling natural colors I'll do something flashy and unatural. I love overly saturated colors anyway. Every mistakes people have been teaching not to do, I made them purposely because I had fun. "don't use purple for shadows, don't use overly saturated colors" etc etc... Ironically that's how I learnt to color, by doing the exact opposite of what people were expecting from a "good art". Since my arts couldn't be good anyway, it didn't really matter as long as I had fun.

And it's always funny to me when people are like "wow, you're so good with colors theory, you must have spend so much time learning", no, I spent a lot of time testing shit and playing with colors because it was fun. Sometimes it didn't work out, sometimes it did and that's how I learnt, 'cause everytime it didn't work (or did) I asked myself why. Which is the next and most important point to learn :

4- THINK your Art

"Practice daily" yes, but not in the way people tell you to. First of all don't draw daily, the only thing you're gonna learn faster is what a burnout is. Practicing isn't the only way to learn, Hell, it ain't even the most effective way to. If you want to improve, the first thing you need to learn and work on is your curiousity. You're bored ? You're waiting your turn to the dentist or whatever ? Look around you, observe. How is this thing shaped ? How many different shape and perspective you see in that one object ? I'll use the exemple of the hand because it's my favorite and the most relevant for that. Do you know why people can't draw hands ? Because when they draw a hand they think a hand. One single object, the hand. But look at your hand, you have your palm with its own unique shape and perspective. Then you have your 5 fingers. While it's all connected, these 5 fingers are all independant, they have their own shape and perspective too. Each finger has 3 parts, all independant too. The palm has 3. Your "single object" hand is actually 17 different objects you need to think and understand. That's the thing you need to "practice" the most, observing, understanding. Instead of doomscrolling shitty-ass TikTok videos or strangers' opinions on shit they don't care about, take that extra time to browse you fav artists. Observe their arts. And that's our next point :

5- Analyzis The first thing you need to understand is how every artstyle is a creature of Frankenstein. You take pieces of things you like to mix it with other things you like. That's also how you learn to draw, by checking what other people are doing. Save your fav arts and artists and analyze them. You don't need to go deep, just ask yourself what you like the most about this art. Is it the very specific eyeshape ? Is it the color palette ? Is it the pose ? The folds on the clothes ? Whatever it is, you need to learn to recognize it and use it too. But not just on other people's arts, on yours too. Your artstyle will change, it will evolve and change as you do. You never stop growing, not just in the way you draw but as a person too. Your tastes will change and grow with you. Art is merely a physical reflection of your soul, everything you love, everything you hate. Your passion and your pain. The most insignificant detail has a deeper meaning in your own history and so art. When I started drawing Sam, I was mostly into goth aesthetic, now I'm more into street wear and it's pretty visible in my arts. It's not an important change, but it does highly impact my artstyle and not just in the way I dress up Sam, but in the colors I use and in my compositions as well. You can also easily spot the worst moments of my life and the best through my stuff, the confidence I gained is visible through my lines. The way you draw today won't be the way you'll draw tomorrow, being able to recognize what you like the most about your arts or someone else's will make this change smoother and better.

6- Learn to find the right tutorials Like I said above, if you try to learn too much all at once, you'll just feel overwhelmed and you won't learn shit. Worst, you might even sabotage things you were improving on steadily and in a good way by trying to do it differently, in someone else's way, through someone else's tastes. That's also why you need to STOP giving unsollicited advices online. Yes, artists need criticisms to improve but most people can't make the goddamn fucking difference between a personal choice and an actual mistake so SHUT THE FUCK UP unless you're asked to. All you'll do is sabotaging people to please your little ego.

The problem with most tutorials (especially in drawing) is how it's only showing you how someone who isn't you drew this very specific thing in this very specific setup. You're not learning anything, your watching how someone else did something specific you won't be able to re-use with a different light or perspective. Watching people's magical little tips to draw a face won't help you improve the way you draw yours, you gotta come up with your own tricks and you will, with time. Of course, not everything is bad. If you're a digital artist, it's important to learn how to use your software and push it to its full potential and you'll need tutorials for that. But when it comes to drawing, you'll learn better and faster by analyzing yourself what people do than watching tutorials your don't understand yet. Think it. Think people's arts and your own.

One of the best source for that is How To Think When You Draw by the Etherington Brothers. Not only is it mostly free (tho there's a paid physical version as well), it also perfectly understood how to learn drawing. It's in the title, "how to think". That's what a good tutorial is, it's not showing you how someone managed to draw something, it shows you how YOU should think the thing.

7- Draw for Fun That's it, that's your final lesson. Stop trying to improve, stop wasting your time in anatomical exercises, in volume exercises and shit. Draw for fun, that's how you'll improve, by not focusing on learning. After a few months (years, even) you'll have a strong enough base just by DRAWING FOR FUN and then AND ONLY THEN, once you already made your base, once you know how to think and how to recognize what you're good at and what you need to improve, THEN you can start exercises and shit. ONE STEP AT A TIME. At some point I worked on my colors, then once I had a strong enough base and understanding in colors to naturally evolve I focused on my lines (as it was way too thick and not "alive" enough), first the whole shape, then the face, right now it's the outfits.

You can always comeback to something you did and improve it later anyway. Keep that in mind. That's it, that's the base to draw. I'm not gonna share more than that. Sure, there's a lot of tips I could give to make you draw "like me" but it was never the point, the point is to have you learn to know yourself and what you want to do and learn first. Stop doing realism because "that's what people do" if you're not into it. Stop trying to give your shadow these "smooth degraded" just because "a shadow isn't solid" if that's not what you're into (it's ugly af unless you're very good at it anyway). Don't please anyone but YOU, don't follow a tutorial from someone you look up to because "that's how they learnt", you're not them. If you really like what they do then rather analyzis it yourself and exploit the parts you enjoyed. The way I did the folds on the neko girl above in the new version is because I saw arts with these large outfits and cool folds and I love it so much I analyzed a shit tons of them to understand HOW it works and why I liked it so much and what I should do to make it look good on my arts. There's no secret "cheat codes", the ones people have are cheat codes they developped themself to match their own personal artstyle and way of working, through years. The only real way to improve is to enjoy yourself, to draw for fun, to keep in mind this is a HOBBY, not your job (at least not yet if you wanna live off of it). You have nobody to impress but you. It doesn't mean you shouldn't want to impress, it's the opposite, it means you need to impress yourself first. You will always impress people or in the opposite have them loath you no matter what you do anyway, so better do that while being happy about yourself. That's why you need to learn to watch your arts and have this "damn, I'm so proud of how I did this" moment.

This Sam sketch is full of imperfections. But I love it. When I did it I thought "damn, that's the kind of art past me looked with admiration, hoping they would one day pull something like that". I love the sketchy lines I did, the reflect on his gloves and top, the hair, the face's traits also. I like the vibe of the plain orange color with no shadow and no other colors (except for the heart but y'know). It's something I've been trying to do for years but in vain, I was always lacking of something.

Or rather it was the other way around, I was trying too much. more than one colors in something that should have had one color, cleaned lines which made them too "round" and bold.

But still, back then I was impressed by what I did, back then I loved that Sam I'm slandering now and that's the most important part of this post and the perfect way to conclude it. I improved not because I hated what I was doing, I improved because I loved it. Because every arts I did made me feel proud, because I saw how I was improving, as far as I was from what I do now which is probably far from what I'll do in a few years. But also because I love what and who I was drawing. Don't try to be a professional just yet, don't behave like one. Growing in art is like growing as a person, in order to be a functionable adult you need a decent childhood. If you have a bad childhood (or no childhood at all), then it will negatively impact the rest of your life forever. It's the same with Art, if you're trying to be "an adult" (a pro) too soon, it will negatively impact the way you draw forever (leading, in most case, to the total inability to draw at all and so to you giving up on it). So stop with all the professional exercises and shit for now, before you learn to "be a good adult" you need to enjoy your "childhood" first, to take the time to live it and to draw your fun little drawing like a kid drawing their little stickmen because it made them happy. Being aware of your mistakes to improve is important and a key part of improving, but for now we're not gonna focus on that, we'll go back on that when your artstyle grew.

That's how you learn to draw, by making it grows with care and love. Your artstyle is your creation and what is your creation if not your child ? So be kind, understanding and patient. There's no such thing as talent, only people who are more passionate. We're not good at something because we were born that way but because we had an interest in it. If you destroy your love and passion over impatience, greed and fame, you'll never evolve. Taking care of that little flame in your heart is more important that practicing if you want to get better.

I'll give more art tips in the future and I already did in the past. But I know very well that if I share anything like that here, that's what you'll focus on, thinking that with hard work you can be faster than others, more "talentuous". The main quality an artist need to grow properly is modesty, it's how to stay humble so don't try to be a pro just yet because you think you can handle it, for now accept that drawing is merely a little hobby you do for fun and like every hobby you don't need to be good to enjoy it.

We live in a world where we teach you to be productive, to have IA doing your hobbies for you so you have more time to work and product so someone richer than you will get even richer, because producting for them is more important than your own development and fun. In a world like that it's important to learn to slow down and take your time, to enjoy things even when you're bad at it. We were all very bad at drawing first, there's no difference. The reason we became better and you're looking up to us is because we kept doing it and loving it anyway. So do that first, take your time, enjoy life, enjoy yourself. For Art is merely a reflexion of your own life.

Until next time, enjoy~