How to Draw Tutorials often Don't Teach You How to Draw

Quite often, folks get caught up with the idea that learning to draw something means looking up a tutorial on how to draw that exact thing. Like, how to draw birds. Cars. Plants. Horses! There are tutorials for everything nowadays.

But these will often lead you down a path where you draw a circle. Then a line. Then more lines. And then you’re following a tutorial that didn’t really teach you anything, and only showed you how to draw one thing one specific way. They often completely ignore drawing fundamentals in favor of getting you to the finish line as fast as possible. They can still be fun, so don’t feel bad if you’ve tried a few like that. I definitely have.

Instead of looking for specific tutorials on how to draw something, here’s what you can do instead. Look up pictures of what you want. Photos, or other pieces of art. Don’t trace, but draw some of those exactly as you see them. This is called “studying” and warms your brain up and gets you thinking. Try to break some of these pictures down into large 3D shapes in your head, and draw those too. Add in some details as best as you can, but don’t go beyond what you understand. Take a look at what you’ve done, and compare it to the original. It might not look great! Remember, that’s expected. You also probably didn’t spend a lot of time detailing either, and that’s also expected. Now, on the side, make sure that if you studied someone else’s work that you don’t claim it as your own: it’s not! You just studied what they did.

Over time, you’ll get better at studying and using these references to mix some of them together and add in some of your own imagination. Pretty soon you’ll realize that no, you didn’t need a how-to-draw tutorial, because you’ve learned the process to draw anything you see! You know that one meme that shows how to draw an owl, and it starts off by drawing a couple circles, and then “draw the rest of the owl?”

Ironically this is actually good advice, at least better than most how-to-draws. Because it carries along the idea that drawing something is about observing the very simple forms it’s made out of, and then using your own eyes and practice to fill in the details in the way that makes sense to you.

I’m not going to tell you to never use these how-to-draw tutorials. Like I said, they can be kinda fun! But I hope you don’t fall into a trap of trying to learn from them long-term, because you will get frustrated when you have trouble expanding your skills. Keep practicing fundamentals like construction, perspective, and values, and you will gain the skills to draw anything you want. You don’t have to be a skilled artist to reach that point: they are fundamentals. The skill comes with repeated practice and honing your craft. However you’d like to draw today, go have some fun! Leave a comment of what you’re gonna doodle; I do read them all. I’ll see ya in the next video!