Draw a lot.
Don’t be precious about materials. Don’t use fancy art board or moleskines. Get a big newsprint pad or a stack of cheap legal pads from Staples. You want to draw as much and as quickly as possible, without being worried about wasting expensive paper.
Draw fearlessly.
Use a pen or Sharpie. No erasers, no correcting fluid. Fill the page completely as fast as you can. Use loose scribbles and gestures. Don’t sweat details. Use The Force — let go your feelings, young Skywalker. Get it right the first time or start over. Try to push each drawing to completion, but if you’re really not happy with where it’s going, toss it in the recycling and move on. Also try drawing without looking at the page. Get ready to be pleasantly surprised by the result.
Draw light, not objects.
Squint your eyes at the scene until all you can see are big blobs of light and dark. Draw those. Try to ignore boundaries of objects; let those emerge out the natural boundaries of light and shadows.
Draw repetitively.
Get a stack of 3×5 index cards. Set up a simple still-life, a bowl of fruit or whatever, and draw it on every single index card. Do it from different angles, distances, etc. Use simple lines and don’t spend more than two minutes on each one.
Draw fast.
Give yourself thirty seconds to do an entire scene. Use big newsprint and a Sharpie. Ignore details. Use wide, loopy gestures. This is an especially important exercise when you get started drawing people, where it’s easy to obsess about faces or hands or feet without ever getting to the overall pose. One out of ten 30-second drawings you do will be amazingly good.
Draw everything.
Bowls of fruit and people are always nice, but try drawing whatever’s around: rocks, tangled computer cables, a brick wall, a rumpled bedsheet, wrappers and packaging, flaking paint, a movie poster, other works of art, a comic book page, an eggbeater, the underside of a table. Imitate other artists you admire. Copy your favorites as exactly as possible.
There’s no such thing as “talent.”
Everybody who draws well got there by practicing, practicing, practicing, formally or informally. The only thing that separates you from the masters is the Gladwellian ten thousand hours. Get to it, and have fun.
Some drawings I like
- The illustrations in Roger Penrose’s book The Road To Reality are delightfully minimalist. I have no idea what the math means, but I enjoy thinking about the drawings.
- Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud is a deep dive into the nature of art through the seemingly innocuous comics medium.
- See tons of interesting art, drawn and otherwise, in my Flickr favorites.