Drawing is an art, quite literally, but people don’t understand that everyone can and has the ability to draw. Even a stick man is a start believe it or not, they are the building blocks of learning how to draw. You don’t have to spend hours on end every day practising to become a good artist you just need patience, creativity and a pencil/pen and paper. To start you will want to draw silly things such as stick men, doodles are a great way to introduce your way into drawing as it gets creative juices flowing without you realizing.

Once you’ve become the master of doodles and want to move a stage further then you can start drawing more specific things. They don’t have to be the best artwork in the world, as long as someone can distinguish what it is you’re on the right path. Draw simple things such as cats, dogs, flowers etc and get people to critique them. I know you don’t want to hear how awful the drawing is but getting feedback is extremely helpful and can help you to see a bigger picture.

Next you move onto maybe adding colour in some way, firstly with just block colour just like in childrens colouring books and then moving onto shading a little. Practise can make perfect, but you don’t have to go too crazy if all you want to do is be able to draw basic things. You need to make sure you are drawing a variety of things rather than just the one thing, just drawing one thing will make you think you are improving when you’re kind of not. Of course if you draw the same thing over and over it will look better with each turn, but then that’s all you’ll be able to draw. Variety is everything when it comes to art, if you don’t learn that early on then it can hinder you.

Then you move into more serious drawing, effectively GCSE level art. This will start with life drawings of fruit bowls and such to see how you perceive a certain view and it also tests all that you will have learnt so far. You’ll also need to start creating “scenes”, such as a woman sat in a park or an aeroplane in the sky from nothing but memory and a selection of pictures as a reference. Reference drawing is much easier to learn, beginning with simple tracing and then eventually trying to copy the drawing yourself from nothing but vision.

A good trick is to see everything as shapes, you learn shapes as a child and it’s something we all know. A plane for example would be a sausage shape with triangular wings and tail. You can always draw over this and rub out the beginning lines you used as guidance, that is the beauty of using a pencil over a pen or felt tip. Just remember that no matter what you draw, you are improving, even if you don’t like what you’ve done. Keep a positive frame of mind and don’t judge yourself before others, being a perfectionist is fine as long as you know your true ability.