How to think when you draw на русском

How to Think of What to Draw

This article was co-authored by Kathy Leader. Kathy Leader is an Artist and the Owner of The Art Process. With more than 36 years of art education experience, she specializes in providing mixed media art workshops for individuals and groups. In addition, she works with businesses and organizations to build morale, encourage creative problem solving, and find de-stressing tools. Kathy holds a BFA in Art Education from The University of Cape Town.

There are 9 references cited in this article, which can be found at the bottom of the page.

This article has been viewed 1,780,503 times.

Drawing can be an enjoyable activity, but sometimes getting started seems like a difficult task. If you’re having trouble thinking of what to draw, jump start your work with some stimulating prompts and other directions. You can also look for inspiration in the art world and other areas of interests or draw a meaningful thing, person, etc. Developing habits that encourage you to draw regularly will also keep your creativity flowing.

Kathy Leader
Artist Expert Interview. 13 February 2022.

Kathy Leader
Artist Expert Interview. 13 February 2022.

Kathy Leader
Artist Expert Interview. 13 February 2022. If there’s nothing around to draw, go looking for photographs that might be interesting or fresh to draw. Tell yourself that you will draw whatever you find on page three of a magazine, for instance, no matter what it is.

7 Sins of Beginner Artists: What Keeps You From Being Good

Everything is hard when you’re a beginner, but the problem with drawing is that everyone thinks they know how to do it. Drawings turn out well or they don’t, but you can’t blame the artist—it’s talent that matters, right?

Absolutely. not! If you haven’t seen any progress despite practicing a lot, it doesn’t mean you don’t have the talent necessary to be a good artist. It may mean you’re just practicing wrong! If you don’t believe me, let me show you common mistakes made by beginner artists. Simply avoid them to kick-start your improvement!

1. I Want to Draw It All

You draw because you have an urge to draw, it’s that simple. Even though your skills limit you, you don’t want to limit yourself—you have so many ideas to draw! One day you draw a dragon fighting a robot. Next day you work on a landscape. Later you decide to practice perspective to draw a whole city. You’re constantly inspired, and it feels great. If only your hand would listen.

What’s Bad About It?

Drawing isn’t a single skill. Even though every drawing is made of lines, using similar hand movements, it’s what happens in the brain that matters. And the processes in the brain are different for various types of drawing.

Think about it: what is the difference between drawing and writing, in a technical sense? Isn’t the latter about drawing letters? Forget about the tool for a moment; you can draw with a ballpoint pen and you can write with a pencil. So, if you can write, you can already draw! What’s more, you even have your own style!

The difference is in the intention, not the result. And different parts of the brain are used for different intentions—different purposes. A written word may be constructed of the same number of lines as a sketched horse, but for your brain they come from two very different processes.

For example, drawing an animal is usually about «feeling» the px of the body. Your job is only to wrap this feeling into lines. Drawing a city, on the other hand, requires mathematical thinking—make one line too short or at the wrong angle and everything will be ruined. Drawing a landscape may not be even about the lines themselves—you should rather focus on the light and shadow, and re-create it on paper with a series of sketchy lines.

By trying to draw every idea that comes to your mind, you unknowingly make it hard for yourself. You may draw a nice cat, but it doesn’t mean you should also be able to draw a background for it without any problem. And constructing a human may be very different for your mind than constructing a spaceship!

How to Fix It?

By drawing many different topics you improve at your «general drawing skill» (B). It’s huge, because it includes all the topics you can draw, so it grows very slowly. Instead of trying to take it to 100%, focus on maximising the smaller skills (A). For example, it’s much easier to get close to 100% at drawing cats!

You need to decide what you want to be able to draw. Instead of trying to mix Latin and Chinese signs and wondering why they don’t mean anything together, focus on one. Don’t jump from one topic to another just because you feel like this.

Try to improve at one topic at a time, and most importantly, don’t look at all your drawings as indicators of your «general drawing skill». If you were great at drawing cars, nobody would call you a bad artist only because you couldn’t draw a lion!

2. I Know How to Draw It, Just Let Me Try

You have seen many dogs in your life, so of course you know what they look like! It’s only that your hand doesn’t understand what you tell it. You try to draw the paws, and they turn out very weird, not as they should. And you know how they should turn out, so why don’t they?

You try once again, and again. You get a different version of paws every time, but none of them fits your vision. Ah, how nice it would be to have talent! You obviously don’t, so your only chance is to try harder.

What’s Bad About It?

You don’t know how the paws should turn out. If you did, you’d draw them that way. Don’t believe me? Come on, describe them in detail. No, don’t draw them. I know the need is strong, but hold on. Imagine you’ve already drawn them. What do you see? Describe it!

In most cases you’ll discover you can tell very little about the object you want to draw. You have this feeling you could draw it with all the details, but, surprisingly, you can’t even tell where these details are. Yes, the head of a rhino is big, and it has a horn. or two horns? There’s a little eye. somewhere in the face, and the mouth is. where?

The more questions you ask yourself about the object, the better you understand why you fail. You don’t really know what you’re trying to draw. You’re just able to recognize if it is what you wanted when it’s already drawn. That’s why you try again, and again. Every time you give yourself something new to recognize, but it doesn’t mean you are any closer to your vision. You’re playing a guessing game!

You don’t really know where the eyes should be exactly—you can only tell if it looks «good enough» when it’s already drawn

How to Fix It?

Sure, there is a chance you’ll guess the right combination of lines eventually, but for what? Just to prove to yourself you can draw it from imagination, without any help? If this is your goal, fine, pursue it, but don’t blame lack of talent for your failures. You chose to play this game on the highest difficulty level, so don’t cry that it’s hard to beat.

To draw something from imagination, first you need to create a mind-recipe for it. That memory of a dog isn’t enough—you need a different form of a memory to convert it into lines. It’s like a photo of a dish and a recipe—it’s almost impossible to re-create the recipe from the photo when you’re just a beginner at cooking.

The mind-photo is something like this: «four legs attached to a body, long neck, long head, long, hairy tail, hooves». This is all the information you need to recognize a drawing of a horse, but it’s not enough to draw it realistically. This is a description of a childish scribble!

The mind-recipe is much more detailed. It contains the proportions between legs and torso, defines where the leg bends exactly, and specifies the kind of joint there is in that point of bending. It doesn’t just tell you that the body of a horse is covered with hair—it defines the direction of the hairs. So that information in your mind should look more like this:

There are three ways to obtain such a recipe:

Before you start drawing, make sure you know the recipe. If you don’t, and you don’t want to learn it, simply use a reference. It’s not cheating! Sure, it’s nice to draw something from memory, but first you need to put it there!

You can learn more about this topic from my articles:

3. It’s Too Late to Give Up Now

Drawing isn’t easy, you know it. You’re sketching this dragon and every couple of minutes you stumble over some problem. These problems accumulate, but you keep going—when you add the colors, nobody will notice something’s wrong. And you can’t stop now, after all these hours!

What’s Bad About It?

Basically, you’re trying to decorate something broken. Even if it looked promising at the beginning, obviously you’re doing something wrong now. Don’t pretend it can be fixed by adding the colors—it’s unlikely. If that leg bends wrong, and you can’t erase it, why do you keep trying to finish the picture? Even if you covered it with gold, it would not fix that anatomical nightmare!

That pose was doomed from the start, but I refused to believe it. Art by me, 2010

How to Fix It?

If you can see your picture’s going wrong, stop. No matter how much time you’ve already invested into the creation of this piece, there’s still some time you can save if you stop now. It often takes less effort to create something anew than to fix it over and over.

If you’re afraid you won’t be able to draw anything so cool ever again, it reveals a bigger problem than that wrongly bent leg. You’re not confident about your skills, which means you should practice before investing hours into one picture. It’s understandable that you want to show others how good you are, but the truth is, for now you aren’t. Don’t hide that truth by pretending you haven’t made a mistake. Learn how to avoid it next time instead.

4. Every Drawing Is Sacred

You don’t only finish every drawing you start. You also always remember to post it to social media, for your friends and fans to see. No matter what it is: a polished masterpiece, a sketch, or a study, you share everything. That’s just how you roll.

What’s Bad About It?

On the surface, it seems pretty harmless. The problem lies deeper. When you are aware that the drawing you’re working on will be seen by someone, you automatically try to adjust it to their needs. That drawing must be perfect! And because you post every drawing, you’re not even allowed to make a mistake—ever.

Mistakes are a natural side-effect of doing something new. If you want to avoid them, the best method is to avoid new things completely. That’s what may happen to you if you share your every picture: even when filling a page in your sketchbook with studies of a hand, you’ll only choose the easy poses you feel comfortable with. It just feels scary that your fans could see a bad drawing of yours!

Having the public observing your every step makes you less prone to risk. If there’s a chance you may lose, it’s better not to play at all and to pretend you could win, if you wanted. You miss an opportunity to learn something by losing, just because you don’t want others to see you lose!

How to Fix It?

There are two ways. First, draw for yourself. Share only the pictures you like the most, and leave the sketches for yourself. When studying a topic, don’t think how cool it would be to show others a full page of sketches («Look how productive I was today!»). Subconsciously, it makes you try harder and be less eager to experiment. And studies aren’t for you to boast over—they’re to learn from!

If you really want to brag about your productivity, it’s better to combine your studies into big batches, so that the failed experiments aren’t really visible

The other way is to. relax. Learn to feel comfortable with the thought that others can see your mistakes. Embrace your imperfection and let yourself be bad. It’s better to show others all your pictures, good and bad, than to draw only the things you are sure will look good.

When you’re a beginner, every drawing seems sacred. You start something, then you must finish it and show it to others. It’s not really the case! Go, try it—sketch something, then tear it apart, just like that. It’s not the last drawing in your life, nor is it the best picture you’ll ever draw. The more attached you are to your drawing, the harder it is for you to learn and change.

Mistakes are inevitable. Don’t pretend you never draw anything bad. Let yourself be bad, and then find the mistakes and see what can you do to avoid them next time. Draw to be better, not to be praised.

5. I Draw Only What You Want to See

Maybe you’re not the best artist, but there are some things you’re quite good at. For example, people love your ponies. Every time you post a pony you get a lot of positive comments; it’s very nice. You used to draw other things, too, but nobody reacted to them at all, so you stopped.

What’s Bad About It?

Because you feel good when someone praises your artwork, it’s natural you want to create what they want to see. The problem occurs when this need becomes pathological—you can’t create anything new in fear it will not be received positively.

Additionally, you become a slave to your public. Your needs don’t matter—your job is to please them. In return, you get praise, but wouldn’t it be nicer to get praise for something you’ve chosen to draw yourself?

Fan art is cool, but make sure it’s not the only thing you’re allowed to draw (picture from Paint Foxy From the Five Nights at Freddy’s Series in Adobe Photoshop)

How to Fix It?

Follow your heart! If you like drawing ponies, fine, but don’t do it just because you think it’s the only thing they want to see. If you want to have fans of your art, not the style/topic you use, you must do your thing. Fan art may be a great method to bring attention, but it shouldn’t be the only way to keep your public.

And sometimes it’s better to have few real fans than to serve dozens of those who don’t really care about you.

Here’s something to read if you want to know more:

6. These Weren’t My Lines, But They Are Now

You have many ideas, but you find yourself unable to start a drawing. You bypass this problem by using line art and bases offered by other artists, and sometimes you use a photo to create your own line art by tracing its lines.

What’s Bad About It?

It’s OK if you draw only for fun, but if you want to be a good artist, this will not take you anywhere. Arranging your house isn’t the same as building it, and you can’t call yourself a builder just because you put a sofa in the living room. Similarly, you’re not really an artist if you are only able to finish someone else’s job.

And it’s not only about the definitions. Starting a drawing is the hardest job—you’ll never learn how to do it if you simply avoid that part. The people who created the line art for you had to learn it first. You can do it, too—if you only give up on easy solutions.

The worst version of this «sin» is when you trace and use bases, but you pretend you don’t. That’s like taking a bus to the finishing line of a race. Even when everyone praises you, the truth doesn’t change—you can’t draw, no matter how good your pictures seem to be.

It’s not about the result, but about the process that leads to it

How to Fix It?

The solution is very simple: to improve, do what is hard. If it’s hard, it means you can’t do it yet, so if you manage to make it easy, it will mean you are better. Avoiding hard things does the opposite—it’s very uncomfortable to come back to them once you learn how to bypass the difficulty.

You can fantasize about how talent makes everything easy and justify your cheating this way, but it’s all about your laziness. People spend hours every day trying to learn how to draw, and you just say, «I don’t have talent, so I must. help myself to create anything».

If you want to be a good artist, change your mindset and start working hard. If you only want to be praised, even due to false reasons, then. why are you even reading this?

7. It’s My Style!

You know your drawings aren’t perfect, but they’re decent. You love it when people appreciate the time you spent to show them your art, but you seethe with resentment when someone does the opposite. How dare they tell you what’s wrong with your picture?? It’s your drawing, you know the best what it should look like!

What’s Bad About It?

First, two definitions:

People commenting on your work are simply voicing their opinions. «It’s so beautiful!» isn’t a fact, because not everyone will agree. This statement doesn’t «define» your artwork as beautiful, nor does it change its state somehow. All it means is that the person likes your picture.

Analogously, when someone says «You can’t draw», it’s their opinion. It doesn’t mean you can’t draw (according to some objective standard), only that this person doesn’t think highly of your skills. Their opinion doesn’t change the truth!

The problem is humans tend to simplify everything to think and react faster. Fact is something that everyone agrees on, but «everyone» may be simplified to «everyone I ask». Then, if you ask ten people, each of them has the power to create a «fact» by stating their opinion!

When you take it that way, every opinion you hear is very risky. Sometimes it’s better to shut them off completely («No comments please, I’m just learning»). But then you won’t get any positive comments either, so you’ll never know if your picture is good! You have two ways to solve it:

The first way is impossible—you’ll never please everyone (but you can simulate this situation by showing your works to favorable viewers only). The other is simply dishonest—it’s as if you said: «Only those who agree with me are right».

How to Fix It?

Let the opinions be what they really are—statements of personal feelings. If you don’t like tomatoes, you don’t need to explain it to anyone; they just taste bad to you. It’s neither good nor bad, unless someone who loves their home-grown tomatoes asks you to judge their taste. Your dislike doesn’t make them bad, but the farmer may feel disappointed.

Everyone has a right to not like your art, just as you don’t have to admire Mona Lisa. Someone says your picture is bad? Fine! They’re just as right as someone who says it’s good. React to both the same way. However, there are objective standards you can use to state a fact.

We separate things from other things by creating definitions for them. If something doesn’t meet its definition, it’s either an abnormal version of this thing, or simply not this thing. If you encounter a bird that doesn’t lay eggs, it means it’s not a bird. If you see a horse with wings, it’s not a horse. But a horse with its knees bent the other way is still a horse, just an abnormal one.

From left to right: a cat, an abnormal cat, and not-a-cat. You can’t blame someone for noticing that in your style cats look abnormal!

It means that if someone says «Wolves have longer legs», they’re stating a fact, not an opinion. Shouting «It’s my style!» doesn’t change the fact that «your» wolves have shorter legs than the real ones. They just do. People may not like it (opinion), but a person noticing the truth is simply right.

Facts can’t be good or bad—only your opinion about them makes them so. Your anger at them simply means you’d like them to be different. For example, if someone says your bear doesn’t look like a real bear (because it’s digitigrade, like a dog), and you’re angry, you’re really angry at your inability to draw a realistic bear. And, again, you think that it’s the person who states the fact who creates it, so you’re directing your anger towards them.

If you want to be a better artist, you need to be more open to critique. These are only words about your artwork, nothing more. You can ignore them or use them to improve. Ask that commenter, why do they think it doesn’t look like a real bear? What should you do to make it more realistic?

Your commenters often see more than you. Listen to the facts, learn from them, and apply their teaching to your pictures. With time you’ll get fewer comments like this, because there will be little to improve! Don’t pretend you’re already good, or you’ll never be.

Read these if you want to know more:

Conclusion

Drawing is deceptively simple, and our misconceptions about it can easily become an obstacle for our improvement. I hope these seven sins will never stand in your way again!

If you’re interested in the topic of improvement as an artist, you should also enjoy these articles:

Draw Your Mind Out: How to Create Without Thinking

Artists are usually pictured as spontaneous, slightly crazy individuals. When they get inspired, they forget about everything and just. create.

However, when you’re merely a beginner artist, it doesn’t seem to work like this. Yes, you get inspired, but you can’t allow yourself to forget about everything—instead, you go and search for a reference or two, or a tutorial, or a set of tips. In the process you lose your primary idea and modify it to what you’re learning. You want to draw a new species of big cats? Sorry, there’s no tutorial for the vision in your head, but here’s how to draw a tiger.

The problem is, you can’t become that free-drawing artist before passing through the learning phase. «Senior» artists simply have their heads full of various memory-references created consciously at one time of their lives, and they use them while working without any visible reference.

But that doesn’t mean you’re fated to draw only generic things until you reach this phase. Follow me to see a method of drawing your mind out, even when you have no idea what it is you want to draw!

Turn It Upside Down

When you start your picture from a reference, there’s little chance you’ll draw something truly original. A reference constrains you—be it a certain pose, or a perspective, or the lighting. You can change it, adjust it by using other references, but this very beginning is extremely important for the final effect.

Let’s assume that your typical process of drawing looks like this:

There’s a clash between steps 2 and 3—it’s just impossible to find a reference that reflects your idea perfectly. That’s why you use something more general and fix the inaccuracies later. But what about the situation when your vision isn’t very clear? How to find a reference for that?

What kind of a reference would I possibly need for this idea?

Let’s shuffle the list a bit:

«Hey», you say, «This is what I did when I was at the very beginning. My pictures looked terrible and that’s why I started using references in the first place!» Well, maybe you did, maybe you didn’t. Take a look at steps 4 and 5. This is where the secret is hidden!

Inspiration and Idea

This one is the easiest, usually. Inspiration comes on its own, even when it’s not expected. You’re watching a movie where a dragon kills a unicorn, and you’re thinking: «What if there were a unicorn that could stand a chance against a dragon? What would such a creature look like?» When you’re inspired, you feel heat in your heart—the urge to go and bring the idea to reality. And the more things stop you (e.g. you’re at work, or school, or there’s dinner to be cooked), the stronger the heat and the more promising the idea looks!

When it comes to inspiration, there’s nothing more powerful than a «what if» question

Inspiration is pure, full of endless promises. Nothing can go wrong here. Then it gives birth to an idea, a child of yours. Your ideas are based not only on the inspiration, but on what you are—on your desires, fears, memories. They’re perfect as they are, because they’re yours.

However, as long as they’re in your mind only, they don’t seem real. You have a lot of things in your mind, right? A lot of imaginary stuff that nobody should care about. But this idea, it’s something you’re in love with. You want it to be real, and in order to do this you need to place it somehow in minds of others. You need to create it.

Starting a Picture

When you were a child, this phase was easy as pie. What’s more, you didn’t even need any prior inspiration to draw. You were given a sheet of paper and a pencil, and this was enough to start drawing. There was always something you could draw, after all! Without thinking, you proceeded to draw your family, your pets, a character from your favorite show. And if your picture didn’t resemble it at all for others, you were happy to explain your parents or your teacher what they should see in it.

What has changed? When you were a kid, your audience was more understanding towards you. You were just too little to do any better. Now, you’re not so little any more. A lot of other people of your age draw awesome things, and the same is expected from you, if you want to be considered a good artist.

A plain sheet of paper and a pencil aren’t enough to start drawing any more. You need an idea, something creative, because another drawing of flowers in a vase won’t impress anyone. But it’s something you’re probably good at, creating ideas. If only bringing them out were easier.

Artistic tabula rasa—the clean canvas that you can fill with anything. That’s why it’s so hard to start!

There is a time in the life of every artist when just drawing isn’t enough. You can’t just draw wolf paws forever and ever, waiting for them to become more realistic on their own. There’s a time when you should suspend creating and start learning. This is when you understand how to find what you need in tutorials and references to complete the gaps in your knowledge.

But there’s a problem in all this. Once you were able to draw your idea, even though others didn’t recognize it. Now you’re not able to draw your idea, even though others do recognize what you’ve drawn. You just wish they recognized what you wanted to draw, and not what it turned out as. And all you can do for now is to learn more and more, endlessly, waiting for the time when you’ll be able to draw anything you want just as you want it!

Is there any way to fulfill this dream about «just drawing» without learning, and learning, and learning? Do you really need to learn wolf anatomy in detail when you want to draw a wolf-like creature once in your life? Can’t you bypass it somehow?

Get Prepared

In order to picture your idea as accurately as possible, you need to draw it without any middlemen. The problem is you rarely know exactly what you want to draw, no matter how clear the idea is. That’s where references come to help—but at the same time, they bring a lot of «noise» you didn’t plan. I’m going to show you a method, step by step, to start your picture without a reference. Because the start is what really matters!

Inspiration Comes First

You can use many ways to get inspired, but I’ll show you one that you may not know about. It works great if you need a fast inspiration with a clear idea. Do you recall any situation when you were doing a repetitive task all day, and then when you closed your eyes you were still seeing it very clearly? We’re going to use it!

Visit the front page of your favorite online art gallery, something with a lot of great, mind-boggling artworks that you can see all at the same time. You can select a category that you’re interested in, or use a mix of them all. Now, simply browse them. Spend at least 30 minutes looking and scrolling. Stay focused, don’t let your mind wander. Pay attention to the act of observation!

DeviantArt will give you a variety of inspiration-inducing works

After seeing loads of them, maybe dozens, maybe hundreds, sit down or lie down comfortably. Close your eyes and stop thinking for a while. If you did this properly, you should still see the artworks before your closed eyes! This is because of the brainwash you’ve just experienced. Your mind tries to sort all this gigantic amount of visual information you have seen in a short period of time, and, obviously, it fails.

What you see now with your «third eye» (with your brain, not eyes directly, because your closed eyes see black only) is not a mix of artworks you have seen, but a mix of elements of them. And they get combined into completely new artworks. At the beginning you may only get fragments of ideas, which is enough to be inspired, but if you practice this way of seeing, you may observe it all with clear, colorful details—like in some dreams.

Stay sitting or lying down for some time, watch this new gallery, and when something draws your attention, observe it carefully. This effect is temporary—the longer and the more intensively you’ve been watching the gallery in reality, the stronger, the clearer, and the longer the visions will be, but they all will fade, eventually. Make the most of them!

To Be Inspired, or Not to Be Inspired

The problem about having a clear idea is it’s very easy to get disappointed when it doesn’t come out as we wanted. If you’re not an experienced artist, it’s much better to have a general idea, e.g. «a frightening beast», «a cute, fluffy creature with huge fangs», etc. If you decide to create without a clear idea, you can still use the method of browsing a gallery—it will stretch your mind like a muscle.

What’s interesting is that you’re able to draw things you could never imagine, if you only let yourself. In order to do this, you must start drawing without any idea. Keep on reading to learn how.

Exercise Short-Term Muscle Memory

You might have heard about muscle memory—if you use your hand in a certain way often, it learns this motion and then it takes less effort for you to repeat it properly. In drawing, it means that if you draw something from a reference, with time it’ll become easier to draw manually, without thinking about it.

You also may know about short-term memory. It’s when you read a phone number and «carry» it in your mind from a screen/paper to the keyboard of your phone. Then it’s lost, because it’s not needed. If you wanted to keep it for longer, you’d need to repeat it a few times and practice recalling it over a longer period of time.

When you draw from imagination (i.e. after long practice), you’re using both long-term muscle memory and long-term «true» memory. When you draw directly from a reference, you’re using «true» short-term memory, omitting muscle memory, as it has nothing to say about it yet. But there’s also short-term muscle memory, and it’s the basis of warm-up drawings.

Let’s say you practice drawing wolves from imagination. You use references first, and then you try to draw a wolf without a reference and it turns out pretty nice. However, next day you’ll probably need to start from scratch again. Even though you remember the details, your new wolves look clumsy and your hand doesn’t seem to help you at all.

When you practice something intensively for a short period of time, your hand kind of learns to foresee your next movement. That’s why your drawings may look better and better as the practice continues without breaks. But when you end it, that memory gets discarded, since you’re not using it any more. A lot of these sessions are required for this memory to get «imprinted» in you.

But it’s not always needed! You may not want to learn how to draw wolves—you just want your creature to have an anatomy similar to the wolf. Is there a way to learn it just for a while?

You’ve probably already realized it. The way is: use references to warm up your hand and to show it what kind of movements you expect from it. Then discard the references and draw what you want, using short-term muscle memory of that recent drawing.

My warm-up sketches from the Draw a Werewolf Warrior tutorial

More precisely, when you’re inspired and you have a more or less clear idea, instead of searching a perfect reference for it, analyze the idea. What does it consist of? Does it have any elements that you can borrow from reality? If so, find references for them. Any references, not necessarily perfect ones. If your creature is wolf-like, gather a bunch of photos of wolves in various poses and shapes.

Then simply sketch them very fast, very loosely. Don’t think too much, turn on good music, and make it as sweet and simple as a warm-up exercise before an intense cardio training. You can even talk to someone while doing it, or listen to an audio-book!

Do it for every element. If your creature is winged, sketch the wings of various birds, big and small, of sparrows, eagles, and vultures. If it has the eyes of a predator, find pictures of lions, crocodiles, hawks, sharks. Don’t analyze, just draw right from a reference. You’re teaching your hand, not your mind, so don’t over-think it.

If your idea is more elusive than that, just look for pictures that have anything to do with it. If you only know it’s some kind of a fierce animal, draw all the fierce animals you can think of. It will help you prepare not only your hand, but also your mind.

Just Draw!

Time for the most important part. You have your idea, you’re very excited about it—or, you have nothing, but you’re still very inspired—and your hand has just learned various movements you may need. There’s no time to waste now—go and draw!

But. How?

This is the question, isn’t it? Let’s analyze it, step by step.

Step 1

If you had a finished picture, no matter how detailed, you could squint your eyes and see it become a dark blob of certain shape. This shape is usually present in your picture from the very start—your personal touch is hidden in it. That’s why using a reference for this first step kills the spirit of the picture—it’s as if you were borrowing the «personal touch» from someone else.

But this time is different! Use only your idea and your hand «charged» with useful movements to draw this general shape of your creature. Do it quickly, and the less you think over it, the better. Before you let your hand learn on its own—this time, let it draw on its own.

If you’re struggling with creating anything, or you can’t seem to find any attractive idea, find some kind of a pattern, something random. Have you ever looked at wallpaper or a floor and seen something that wasn’t there? Our minds are great at this. Use this feature to find your idea along with its basic lines in any chaos.

Just relax and look—you can find it everywhere!

The fact is you don’t need an idea to start a picture. Draw anything, a tangled thicket of lines and blobs. Let your mind find something in it—something you could never imagine consciously. Treat it as a «connect the dots» game—observe it and add lines that will make it complete.

There’s no better way to fight art-block than to draw a bunch of chaotic lines! They take almost no time, so you can try as long as something promising turns out

Step 2

Congratulations, that was the hardest part! Now, add the limbs, all of them. Legs, wings, additional appendages. A tail, if present, may find its spot in this step, too. Just make them quick and simple, no paws, and even the joints may be rather figurative. Make them follow the rhythm you’ve established in the first step.

Step 3

Your mind should now recognize something in this chaotic shape, and this will give you a direction to follow. Use this feeling to decorate that big blob with smaller shapes that roughly resemble something—maybe horns, maybe the silhouette of wings, maybe a mane, spikes, or hard scale-plates.

Step 4

We’re diving into details now. Squint your eyes and try to tell what you see. If some of the elements resemble something, but not as much as they could, fix them. Add some smaller details like eyes, nose, paws with fingers and claws, smaller spikes here and there. You can refine the joints, and define the muscles roughly, just to establish the general shape of the body once and for all.

At this stage you should know what you’re seeing, even though it may not be clear for others. Repeat this step as many times as needed until you’re sure about all the elements. However, it should stay just a loose sketch—don’t clean it up!

Now, an important hint. Although you may think there’s only one way to picture your idea properly, there are probably thousands of them. You can use the fact that this phase is so quick and effortless to prepare a whole set of sketches. Then you just need to choose the one that «feels» the most accurate. If you prepare only one sketch, you’ll never know if it’s the best you could do!

While drawing, turn on some music that fits your topic. For example, epic orchestral pieces will be great for designing a knight, and African rhythms for drawing a lion-like predator. It’s your subconscious that’s really creating at the moment, so give it as much help as possible from every sense. Me, I like to get the same facial expression that I’m trying to draw (even if it’s a dragon), so that I can feel it more clearly.

Find Your References

Oddly enough, we’ve survived that creation phase without any reference! Thanks to this, your sketch is truly yours, with your own style, and you may like it more than a super-refined sketch based on a reference.

But, as we mentioned before, this was just a workaround. We can’t draw properly something we don’t know. If we don’t know how a wolf paw looks, we need a reference—otherwise you’ll draw only what you think it looks like. However, with our base sketch established, we should know exactly what references we need. So, look at your picture, see what it is made of, and find its counterparts in real world.

I’ve searched for photos of «lizard spikes», «flint», «bark», «fern», and others to get this design right

If you did this traditional way, you would need to adjust your idea to a reference. Now you adjust a reference to your idea! What can go wrong?

Because you haven’t used a reference for the anatomy, you might have made some mistakes that are revealed now. It’s your job to separate stylization/exaggeration from harmful misconceptions. For example, a calf larger than a thigh may be OK, but redundant joints require some skill to be drawn believably. If you’re a beginner, stay with safe solutions—go back to «crazy» anatomy when you have more experience.

Anatomy may not be the only thing that can look wrong in your sketch. Fix everything that needs to be fixed, but not more than this. This is what references are for—they let you draw things you have never learned to draw. Let them do their job!

Finish the Picture

Now I can’t help you any more. There are so many things you can do with your sketch! But this is the most fun part. The idea is established and it won’t go anywhere, no matter what you do now. What’s important, you can use this sketch as a base for painting tutorials, like this winged hussar or this werewolf warrior. Simply skip the sketch-creation part and go learning!

Conclusion

Drawing, as long as it’s not your job (yet), should be fun. Focusing on improvement is very important, but it may weaken your creativity. Don’t let your ideas rot in your mind—let them out from time to time. It will remind you why you started to learn how to draw in the first place, and will give you power for the harder lessons to come. It will also train your creativity, and that’s an important skill to have in this job.

Why learn, then, if you can draw anything without it? The more references you have in your mind, the easier it is for you to start a «general shape» that resembles something real, and to guess the details you need to add to make it realistic. It’s because the more elements you already know, the easier it will be for you to find them before they’re complete.

So, as always, it’s all a matter of balance. Keep on learning, but never forget why you’re doing it. Use your creative sketches to find out what you can’t do, and then focus on fixing it. Good luck!

Think With Forms, Not Lines: Take Your Drawing to the Next Level

Drawing, at its most basic level, is intuitive to us. Even young children know how to transfer the image in their head into a set of pencil strokes, even though they may not resemble anything to others. When we grow up, we learn more about the world around us, and we learn how to depict it more accurately with lines.

Lines seem to be almost interchangeable with drawing, but if you look carefully, you won’t find them anywhere in the real world. It’s us who pack the real objects into tight-fitting wrapping, because wrapping is all we can draw. Wrapping, the lines, is an approximation of reality, and, as it is with approximations, there may be many of them describing the same thing.

Until you understand it, you’re forced to draw flatly, using lines as something natural and constant. You’re forced to draw your creatures, no matter how beautifully imagined, in one obvious pose, with a shading that doesn’t make it any less flat. This is how far talent can take you. Now it’s time to take your skill into your own hands. I’ll show you a way of thinking you need to use to fully control the lines; to create them from imagination and still make them more realistic than the traced ones.

One last thing before we start: I want you to really, really focus when reading this article. If something seems confusing, stop for a while, re-read it, and try it in practice. If you keep reading without doing that, you won’t learn anything.

What Are Lines and Where Do They Come From?

Two Ways of Drawing

We can’t draw reality. It’s too complex, even if we took only the visual side of it into consideration. If you use only a still snapshot of it, a single frame, you can try to re-create it with colors of various brightness and saturation, simulating the light and shadow of the image. Of course, it will be still a painting of a picture, not of reality.

It’s different with drawing. Drawing is based on lines, and lines symbolize the edges of objects we observe. But once we separate the edges from their «parents», the lines become something on their own. They can even be used without any parent—you can use them to depict something you have never seen.

Apparently, our minds don’t need much to recognize reality. We are very skilled in terms of recognizing patterns and symbols, even when they’re quite far from reality. We don’t need to carefully trace edges from a photo to depict an object—we can draw lines randomly until our mind recognizes them as something.

So, there are two types of lines. The first consists of the edges derived from a still frame of reality. There are no arbitrary edges, but the more of them you include, the more realistic the outcome. The other one is a kind of reverse of it: you draw any lines and wait for your mind to lead you to a recognizable outcome. There are many recognizable outcomes, and the more skilled you are, the closer it is to the result of the first type.

We use both ways when learning how to draw. The first one is used commonly as tracing, or when we use a reference. And that’s the easy way to get a recognizable picture, but it’s the way to draw only things that you’ve already seen. Boring!

The other one is used when you draw from imagination. You have some image in your mind, but you can’t take lines from it, because you don’t really see it. Just like a text you try to read in your dream, the image changes each time you try to focus on it. The only way to draw it is to. draw it, constantly comparing every line to your expectation. Obviously, it’s not easy.

When Talent Becomes an Obstacle

Talent is a very specific «teacher». It lets you do the things you have never learned consciously—they just seem to turn out on their own. However, when talking about talent we usually imagine a person creating masterpieces just like this, without any effort. The truth is that talent will never give any skill to you—it will only make the basics obvious.

It may seem like a good thing, but I discovered that drawing talent is often an obstacle to your progress. You never learn how to draw, you just draw, and wait for great effects. It works for a while, but then comes a time when the progress just stops. And you don’t know what to do, because you have never had this problem before!

When a talented person draws, the lines resemble reality more than the lines of others. The artist doesn’t know how it happens; it just happens. Therefore, a talented artist doesn’t have any control over their progress. All they can do is to draw more and hope for the best.

No matter whether you’re talented or not, to learn how to draw you need to understand the origin of lines. You need to understand the difference between the lines that our mind recognizes as realistic and the ones that are just a mess. Only then will you gain control over your drawings, and you won’t be a slave of talent or lack thereof.

The Origin of Lines—the Form

We derive lines mostly from edges. Edges can be «seen» even by a blind person, because they can be felt as abrupt changes in the object’s form. But you don’t need to touch the object to find the edges—the uneven form influences the light hitting it, so the lines are usually pretty clear.

The problem with lines derived from edges is that the same set of lines can be used to depict different forms:

Forms and their cross-sections as seen in side view

It seems that shading is the key to present the true form of an object, but does it mean that unshaded drawings must be flat? Fortunately, no, and I’m sure you’ve seen a lot of sketches with more depth than detailed, colored drawings. How does it work?

Many Faces of a Form

The difference between a form and a flat object is that the latter has only one side. It doesn’t have a front, back, top, and bottom, and thus it can’t be rotated. It can be easily done with a form, which actually is part of its definition.

Let’s look at three sides of a cube, which is a very nice, regular form. We can see the left side (1), top side (2), and right side (3). Each of them, separately, looks very flat and boring. In fact, you can’t even shade them to make them more interesting!

This kind of view occurs when you look at a form placed in a «default» position.

If you rotate the form horizontally, you’ll see two sides at the same time. But it still looks flat!

Let’s rotate the form vertically, too. Voila!

The very definition of a form is that it can be rotated to reveal another side. However, in a still image there is no visual difference between a flat object and an unrotated form without revealed sides. You must rotate the form to give it depth, and that’s just what we did in this short tutorial:

This cat was a 3D form from the start, but it needed to be rotated to prove it to our eyes

From Forms to Lines

In order to draw lines resembling forms, not flat sheets of paper, we need to base them on forms. Talented artists achieve this effect by trial and error, waiting for the proper lines to appear on their own. When they do, the artist doesn’t know where they came from or how to modify them without losing their meaning.

The real secret to drawing forms is not the lines you’re drawing, but knowing where they come from. Or rather: where they should come from. Before starting a drawing you should imagine the form you want to base your lines on, instead of drawing lines on their own. So, the key is to know how the lines should change when the object is rotated, as the opposite to just remembering a particular set of lines leading to a particular pose.

That’s the real reason for why beginner artists tend to draw the same «default» pose all the time. They have no idea how to convert it visually to a 3D form to rotate it. It also applies to the problem with drawing from imagination, when you can draw a horse when looking at a picture, but without it you’re lost.

Lines are hard to remember and they can’t be modified; forms are easy to remember and they can be modified freely. The reason why we choose the former is because it’s intuitive and talent-based. The latter requires more effort and active learning, but the prize is worth it!

How to Draw Forms Instead of Lines

Now that we know why forms are more important than lines, let’s see how we can use this knowledge in practice.

1. Think With Forms

The first thing is the change of thinking. If you can easily redraw something from a still photo, but not from life (even if the object is not moving), it points to this very problem—you focus too much on the outlines. I’ll show you what I mean:

Let’s say you’re looking at this photo, preparing for drawing it. You think you see a horse, but what you really see.

. looks more like this. You separate the body from the background and look for distinctive edges.

Then you proceed to draw what you see. What do you think—did you really draw a horse this way? Or rather just some edges you’ve noticed on its body, edges that others will recognize as horse-like?

This may be a decent method, as long as you stick to redrawing references. Because it doesn’t allow for predicting other poses! Look at the two examples below. These are both horses, just in different poses. In reality they are almost identical, but their lines have nothing in common!

You can’t derive the lines of one pose from the lines of another

So, this is your first exercise. You need to change your thinking habits, which will not happen overnight, but don’t let that stop you! What you should do is to observe objects around you and de-construct them. Imagine every complicated object as made of simpler objects. Yes, even the horse!

It may be very hard to rotate a horse in your mind, but what about simpler forms like balls, eggs, or barrels?

2. Understand the Concept of Sides

Most of us understand this concept intuitively, but when it comes to drawing we tend to forget about it. Let’s sum up the most important rules, and I’ll show you why they’re so important! It may get a bit geometrical for a moment, but basic rules are easiest explained this way.

1. Basic Sides

There are six basic sides we can find in forms, even when they have very complex surfaces and smooth edges:

The «side» sides can be called left and right, depending on which point of orientation you pick. If you stand in front of the box, side A is your left side, and side B your right side.

It applies even to such an irregular form as Mr. Chubby’s body:

2. Views

The problem with sides is they can’t be seen all at the same time. For example, when you are in front of the. front, you can see only this and nothing more. The box looks like a square this way. To see any other side you need to move the box, or you need to move yourself away from the box:

You can’t see more than three sides at the same time.

If you want to make sure you understand it, redraw every picture of Mr. Chubby you can find in this article

3. Opposite Sides

There are three pairs of opposite sides: top-bottom, front-back, left-right. The rule about them is they can’t be seen at the same time, because one overlaps another.

4. Adjacent Sides

Adjacent sides can be seen at the same time, but the more you see of one of them, the less of the other. The only way to see one side completely is to use a view with no adjacent sides visible.

5. Perpendicular Lines

Only when one or two sides are visible can their edges create a right angle (they’re perpendicular to each other). When you want to see the third side, too, this relation is lost.

It’s impossible to show three sides at the same time and keep any right angle. You can use it as a simple method to determine whether the form has been rotated properly.

If you use the wrong angles when drawing a complicated creature, it may look «kinda wrong, but I don’t know why». Drawing the lines at the beginning may help you avoid this situation

6. Distance

Objects get optically smaller with distance, so if two opposite sides are very far from each other (the object is big), the more distant one will appear smaller.

Mr. Chubby as seen by an ant it’s jumping over

For an exercise, check your drawings and find ones in which you tried to achieve a 3D effect, unintentionally ignoring some of these rules. Can you understand your mistakes now?

3. Understand the Concept of Directing Lines

The sides of a cube are easy to understand, but the objects we draw are rarely constructed so neatly. They’re usually some kind of approximation between the sides, as presented here:

However, the concept of sides can be used as a base for a much more useful method of presenting rotation. I don’t know if it has any professional name, so let’s call it directing lines for now. Their purpose is to convince your eyes that they’re looking at a rotated form instead of a flat set of lines.

Let’s use a cylinder as an example. It’s an elongated form with a circle as a base. In most of the views it looks like a rectangle, but in top view (3) and bottom view (4) it looks like a circle. This is important!

The same applies to side views, if the cylinder is positioned horizontally:

This is exactly what happens to every form with a roughly circular cross-section, like the body of Mr. Chubby:

That mystical foreshortening you may have heard about is nothing more than the change between two views—the change of length of sides as described in rule 4 (adjacent sides).

Mr. Chubby’s face isn’t completely flat, that’s why the length B is approximated

When you want to draw directing lines on a side of a form in some transitional view, imagine how the edge you’re trying to draw looks at the two views between which you are. It will be as transitional as your view:

The general rule can be described this way:

If you want to be sure you’re drawing the curves properly, always draw them as full ellipses—the loss of symmetry will be a sign you’re losing the accuracy.

Draw the «inner» half of the ellipse with subtler lines and you’ll see the depth instantly

If you looked carefully, you might have noticed one more curve on Mr. Chubby that doesn’t follow the rules we’ve just described. It’s because for now we’ve been talking about the cylinder, and Mr. Chubby is fully rounded. Relax—there’s just one more thing to add here, and it derives from what we already know.

A cylinder has only one circular cross-section, and a sphere has three of them—all perpendicular to each other. It means that if one of them looks like a circle to you, the other ones will look like straight lines.

That’s why Mr. Chubby doesn’t have only one set of curves. Let’s take a closer look:

Take some time to understand this scheme. Try to rotate the sphere in your mind and compare it to the body of Mr. Chubby.

There’s one problem with the three-side view, though. A circle seen in it is not only shortened vertically and horizontally, but also kind of rotated. Instead of trying to understand how to rotate it, just remember this ellipse has two pairs of long curves (1) and two of rounder curves (2).

Can you feel your brain steaming? Take a break to find directing lines in your environment!

Directing lines are able to change a flat outline into a whole set of different forms

4. Analyze & Practice Until It’s Obvious

OK, now you now the rules, but they seem to have more in common with math than with reality. To really understand how to use them you must «feel» them; there’s no better exercise for that than tracing.

Gather a whole set of references, first with some simple objects. Print them on one page, slightly lighter (you can lower the opacity of the images or change the lightness in the printer’s settings). Analyze: where is the «camera» in the picture? Is it above the object or under it? Should the directing lines be curved up or down, then? Strongly or slightly?

When in doubt, go back to my explanation of the rules and try to see them in practice. Don’t use a ruler or any other tools; try to draw your lines loosely, with a relaxed hand. Draw them lightly, and then stress the outlines. You can also experiment by drawing the lines intentionally wrong, to see what happens to your perception of the object.

When you feel ready, you can try more complicated objects. Draw the lines on them, then try to re-draw the same objects in different poses.

From Forms to Lines—in Practice

You may feel quite confused now—first I tell you that we shouldn’t start a drawing with lines, and then I give you a whole bunch of complicated rules which lead to. more lines. Let me explain it.

I mentioned earlier that there are two ways of drawing. For drawing from imagination we always need to use the second method: start with random lines and wait for our mind to recognize them. However, drawing with forms adds another phase to it. You don’t start your picture with lines that will be a part of the end result—you’re sketching the form and waiting for your mind to recognize it. Once the forms are established, you can safely add the detailing lines, knowing that they will look good no matter what!

Let’s see how it works!

Step 1

Start by sketching the base idea. You don’t need to use the directing lines yet, but take the rules of sides into consideration.

Step 2

Take a moment to understand what kinds of forms your sketch suggests. How are they rotated? You can define the rotation with simple crosses of directing lines.

Step 3

Once the base is done, you can add the rest of the body, following the directing lines of the base. Of course, simply knowing the forms will not make the animal anatomy obvious. You need to spend some time analyzing the pictures of a real animal and trying to convert it to simple forms. Once you memorize them, you’ll be able to draw the animal from imagination!

Step 4

Now it’s time for «normal» drawing. You can add all the details without wondering where they should go, or how they’re changed by rotation.

Notice how the fur points to some of the directing lines

Conclusion

Can you see now how forms, though hard to explain, make drawing easier? Sure, it may seem overly complicated now, but the truth is you’re working with forms every time you try to draw realistically. You just don’t know about it, so you’re shooting in the dark. No wonder it’s so hard!

It’s natural if you feel overwhelmed by it, but don’t give up! Take your time, and learn it step by step; you don’t need to grasp it all overnight. You’ve been presented with the secret of all the great artists—don’t reject it only because it’s complicated. Slowly apply it to your way of drawing, and come back here every time you have a question you need answered.

If you’re interested in this topic, and you’d like to know why a form moved away from us looks like a rotated form, check out this article. You can also learn more about using forms when drawing from imagination with How to Learn to Draw: Stage 3.

How to Think: The Skill You’ve Never Been Taught

No skill is more valuable and harder to come by than the ability to critically think through problems.

When it comes to thinking, the mind has an optimal way to be operated. When operated correctly, you’ll find yourself with plenty of free time. When operated incorrectly, most of your time will be consumed correcting mistakes.

Good decisions create time, bad ones consume it. Good initial decisions pay dividends for years, allowing abundant free time and low stress. Poor decisions, on the other hand, consume time, increase anxiety, and drain us of energy.

But how can we learn how to think?

For the answer, we turn to Solitude and Leadership, a lecture given by William Deresiewicz. The entire essay is worth reading (and re-reading).

Learning How To Think

Let’s start with how you don’t learn to think. A study by a team of researchers at Stanford came out a couple of months ago. The investigators wanted to figure out how today’s college students were able to multitask so much more effectively than adults. How do they manage to do it, the researchers asked? The answer, they discovered—and this is by no means what they expected—is that they don’t. The enhanced cognitive abilities the investigators expected to find, the mental faculties that enable people to multitask effectively, were simply not there. In other words, people do not multitask effectively. And here’s the really surprising finding: the more people multitask, the worse they are, not just at other mental abilities, but at multitasking itself.

One thing that made the study different from others is that the researchers didn’t test people’s cognitive functions while they were multitasking. They separated the subject group into high multitaskers and low multitaskers and used a different set of tests to measure the kinds of cognitive abilities involved in multitasking. They found that in every case the high multitaskers scored worse. They were worse at distinguishing between relevant and irrelevant information and ignoring the latter. In other words, they were more distractible. They were worse at what you might call “mental filing”: keeping information in the right conceptual boxes and being able to retrieve it quickly. In other words, their minds were more disorganized. And they were even worse at the very thing that defines multitasking itself: switching between tasks.

Multitasking, in short, is not only not thinking, it impairs your ability to think. Thinking means concentrating on one thing long enough to develop an idea about it. Not learning other people’s ideas, or memorizing a body of information, however much those may sometimes be useful. Developing your own ideas. In short, thinking for yourself. You simply cannot do that in bursts of 20 seconds at a time, constantly interrupted by Facebook messages or Twitter tweets, or fiddling with your iPod, or watching something on YouTube.

I find for myself that my first thought is never my best thought. My first thought is always someone else’s; it’s always what I’ve already heard about the subject, always the conventional wisdom. It’s only by concentrating, sticking to the question, being patient, letting all the parts of my mind come into play, that I arrive at an original idea. By giving my brain a chance to make associations, draw connections, take me by surprise. And often even that idea doesn’t turn out to be very good. I need time to think about it, too, to make mistakes and recognize them, to make false starts and correct them, to outlast my impulses, to defeat my desire to declare the job done and move on to the next thing.

I used to have students who bragged to me about how fast they wrote their papers. I would tell them that the great German novelist Thomas Mann said that a writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people. The best writers write much more slowly than everyone else, and the better they are, the slower they write. James Joyce wrote Ulysses, the greatest novel of the 20th century, at the rate of about a hundred words a day—half the length of the selection I read you earlier from Heart of Darkness—for seven years. T. S. Eliot, one of the greatest poets our country has ever produced, wrote about 150 pages of poetry over the course of his entire 25-year career. That’s half a page a month. So it is with any other form of thought. You do your best thinking by slowing down and concentrating.

Improving Thinking

The best way to improve your ability to think is to spend large chunks of time thinking.

One way to force yourself to slow down and think is to write. Good writing requires good thinking.

“If you’re thinking without writing, you only think you’re thinking.”

Writing gives poor thinking nowhere to hide. A lack of understanding becomes visible.

You can’t simply take a few minutes here and there, get the gist of the problem, and expect to have clear writing.

Good writing, like good thinking, takes time.

It’s only by concentrating, sticking to the question, being patient, letting all the parts of my mind come into play, that I arrive at an original idea. By giving my brain a chance to make associations, draw connections, take me by surprise.

One heuristic to tell how good someone is at making decisions is by how much time they have.

The busiest people are often the ones who make the worst decisions. Busy people spend a lot of time and energy correcting poor decisions. And because they’re so busy correcting past decisions, they never seem to have the time to make good decisions.

Good thinking is expensive. Bad thinking costs a fortune.

Good decision-makers understand a simple truth: you can’t make good decisions without good thinking, and good thinking requires time.

If you want to think better, schedule time to write out your thoughts.