How to start
3yr
@nayan
I am complete beginner and new to the world of drawing and painting.
I guess there are many more unlike me and suffering the same problem that is finding a course for complete beginners. Can someone help me with finding a course that teaches how to actually start ?
Asked for help
Hey I'm new here and I really wanna sketch and draw I'm a little bit good at my drawing but I really wanna improve my art work also to figure out my art style
Don’t worry about style. Too many people gravitate toward that (or what they think that is) and it becomes an awful crutch. Style is the exaggeration of fundamentals. You need to learn them to have style. When you don’t have them, it shows. Yet many people will argue that the flaws of their drawings are actually their style. This slows progress as an artist because you don’t allow yourself to take critique if you think defensively.
I don’t really think my art has “style”, but I have made this same mistake numerous times in other areas of my life. I simply refused mastery of any actual skill, in favor of excuses. Delicious excuses. Now I’m fat with wasted potential.
Don't be like me.
I think there are many different approaches and it can definitely be discouraging at first. Think of it like a journey. For me the courses/books that helped the most to get started were:
Drawabox
Prokos figure drawing
Perspective made easy by Ernest norling
Any of Andrew loomis' books but start with fun with a pencil
Stephen baumans classes on patreon
Drawing a still life a day. It usually was a simple geometric object like a Styrofoam ball
Lessons in classical drawing by Julia arrestiedes
Hi, if you haven't found it yet I've been using portrait drawing fundamentals and plan on starting figure drawing fundamentals, and anatomy of the human body.
these seem to cover the basics to help you start to understand fine art its a lot to take in and practice but these seem like the best starter courses. Hope this helps good luck!
I don't know if it's on here but @Peter Han course on Dynamic Sketching is really good to get a fundamental understanding of forms and shapes in space and how to make stuff out of them. he also teaches good penmanship.
Hello Nayan, the first thing to do is to learn how to practice. Lots of artists just dive into drawing and painting and make slow progress for months or years until they either give up, get to the level they want, or hit on better practice methods and skyrocket. If you fail to prepare you prepare to fail, so make sure you have time, at least half an hour every other day to commit to this. Please see Sycra's iterative drawing video. There are other methods but this is the one I use and whose benefits I am most familiar with.
Once you have done this, you can start. Find out about the principles of structure, simplifying everything into boxes, spheres, cones, cylinders, and pair that up with perspective. Draw lots of different things, from life preferably, just understand how to show the 3D world on paper. Please work on paper, you can mess around with a pen tablet later. You absolutely must do this, it is not something you can skip out on. The better you do this, the better you draw; the better you draw, the better you paint.
Most beginner tutorials teach by simplifying their subject into basic 3D shapes. Once you've done this you can try any of those you like.
You want to paint - see Marco Bucci's 10 minutes to better painting and his colour theory videos, they are a popular condensing of painting's theory, though other artists teach the same in different ways. James Gurney's Colour and Light book is even better. You don't have to buy expensive supplies, with practice you can use a tube of white and black poster paint to make some amazing stuff. See Chris Fornataro's video "How you can quickly improve your portrait paintings".
I would encourage beginners to look at the art community and look for what is missing, then fill it in. A lot of artists don't realise that the anatomy they are taught is European, resulting in everyone drawing Europeans. A greater number imitate trends when they are perfectly capable of making even better original art. It may be overlooked or considered the realm of snobbish banana collectors, but the best art is the one that satisfies a personal interest. Why was Leyendecker so good?
Recommendations + Links:
- The Draftsmen Podcast.
- Bridgeman's Constructive Anatomy (advanced).
- Paul Ingbretson (advanced).
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k0ufz75UvHs Sycra | Iterative Drawing - The Fastest Way to Improve.
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=56XMcUQE73E Paint Coach (Chris Fornataro) | How You Can Quickly Improve Your Portrait Paintings.
- Joseph Christian Leyendecker.
- Aw Anqi.
- The Proko Community (for feedback).
- A good quality mechanical pencil.
I started with the figure drawing fundamentals course and it went pretty well: https://www.proko.com/course/figure-drawing-fundamentals/overview
If you’re super new to drawing I’d recommend also following some more basic tutorials on youtube (xabio arts on youtube helped me a lot getting started) and then you can post your drawings here for feedback.
hope that was helpful 🙂
