Learn to Draw: The Basics

You only need paper and a pencil. A regular HB or #2 pencil is fine. If you want more, add a soft 2B or 4B for darks and a kneaded eraser, which lifts graphite without smearing.

• Draw from your shoulder and elbow, not just your wrist, for long lines. Wrist and fingers are for small details.
• Ghost the line first. Hover over the paper and move through the stroke two or three times, then lower the pencil and draw it in one smooth pass.
• Look at where you're going, not at the pencil tip. Your hand follows your eyes.
• Start light. Sketch with light pressure so wrong lines are easy to ignore or erase. Darken the right ones at the end.
• One stroke beats ten hairy ones. Short, scratchy strokes look unsure. A confident line that's slightly off looks better than a wobbly accurate one.

Warm-up drill (5 minutes)

1. Put two dots on the page. Connect them with one straight stroke. Repeat 20 times with different angles and lengths.
2. Draw rows of circles and ovals in one motion each. Go around 2 or 3 times lightly.
3. Draw long, smooth S-curves across the page.

Almost everything can be built from a few basic forms: boxes, cylinders, spheres and cones. A mug is a cylinder. A car is a stack of boxes. A head starts as a sphere. Artists call this construction: rough out the big simple shapes first, then refine.

• Big to small. Block in the overall shape before any details like eyes, buttons or leaves.
• Draw through. Sketch the hidden back edges lightly, as if the object were glass. It keeps shapes solid and symmetrical.
• Negative space. Look at the shapes between things, like the gap between a chair's legs. They're easier to see accurately than the object itself.
• Draw what you see, not what you know. Your brain says a table top is a rectangle. From where you sit, it's probably a slanted shape.

Finger or mouse drawing is hard. That's fine. The pad is for practicing the steps. Do the same exercise on paper afterward.

Things look smaller the farther away they are, and parallel lines going away from you seem to meet. Perspective drawing is a system for faking that on flat paper.

• Horizon line: a level line at your eye height. Look straight ahead; that's where it is.
• Vanishing point: a dot on the horizon where parallel lines going away from you meet. Think of railroad tracks.
• One-point perspective: you face the object straight on. Front edges stay flat and square; edges going away all head to one point. Good for roads, hallways and rooms.
• Two-point perspective: you look at a corner. There are two vanishing points, one far left and one far right. Vertical lines stay straight up and down. Good for buildings and boxes.
• Objects above the horizon show their bottom. Objects below it show their top.

Use the cube exercises in the drawing pad above. A cube is the most useful thing you'll ever practice: once you can draw a box from any angle, you can draw a house, a phone, a book or a car.

Proportion is how big parts are compared to each other. Beginners usually draw what feels important bigger, like eyes and hands. Measuring keeps you honest.

Sighting with your pencil

1. Hold your pencil at arm's length, elbow locked, one eye closed.
2. Line the pencil tip up with the top of something (say, a bottle's cap) and slide your thumb down to its bottom. That's your unit.
3. Keeping your arm locked, compare: “The bottle is 3 caps tall.” “The table is 2 bottles wide.”
4. Hold the pencil level or plumb to check angles: “That edge tilts about like a clock hand at 2 o'clock.”

Handy human proportions

• An adult is about 7 to 8 heads tall. A young child is closer to 4 or 5.
• The eyes sit about halfway down the head, not near the top. This is the most common beginner mistake.
• The space between the eyes is about one eye wide.
• The bottom of the nose is about halfway between the eyes and the chin; the mouth is about a third of the way from nose to chin.
• Arms hang so the wrists reach about the hips.

Real people vary. These are averages to check your drawing against, not rules. Measure the actual person when you can.

Value means how light or dark something is, ignoring color. Values make a flat circle look like a ball. Pick one light source and keep it consistent.

Ways to shade

• Hatching: parallel lines. Closer together = darker.
• Cross-hatching: layers of hatching in different directions for deeper darks.
• Smooth shading: the side of the pencil in small overlapping circles or strokes. Build up layers instead of pressing hard.
• Squint at your subject. It blurs details and shows you the big light and dark shapes.

A value scale is a row of boxes from white to black in even steps. Drawing one teaches your hand to control pressure. Try ordering these by eye first:

Now do it on paper: draw seven boxes in a row, leave the first white, press as dark as you can in the last, and fill the middle five in even steps.

Gesture drawing means capturing the movement and pose of a figure in a few quick lines, often in 30 seconds to 2 minutes. It's not meant to be neat. Start with one curved “line of action” for the spine, then add the head, the tilt of the shoulders and hips, and the limbs as simple lines.

• Draw people in a café, pets sleeping, or use free timed pose sites and photos.
• Keep it loose. If you're drawing fingers, you're going too slow.
• Short time limits force you to see the big shape first, which helps every other kind of drawing.

A 20-minute daily routine

Keep everything. Date your pages. In a month, compare the first page with the latest. Daily short practice beats a long session once a week.