To easy draw everything seems to be a hard hurdle to jump in the beginning, usually this is because you don’t know, what you don’t know, so it’s not really hard, you just don’t know.

Drawing is no different and so in the beginning you need the right help, and information to get you started in the right direction, with your best foot forward.

I have been drawing to a high standard for 35 plus years and I have read a substantial amount of information, about how to draw. All of it gives the same information over and over again because there are only a few basic rules. All of this being important information to know and understand but also a bit unnecessary, a bit advanced for beginners because these basic learning to draw rules are about looking, understanding, and translating what you see.

I have looked at hundreds of web sites offering free information about how to draw, with all of them providing the same or similar information, that is designed to get you looking.

The problem in the beginning is knowing how your tools work, what they can do and how you can do it, as well as being able to look at something accurately, retain that information so you can reproduce it onto a drawing surface, as a recording. I do not know what you think but to me that seems to be a little complicated and quite an obstacle to overcome as a beginner.

Don’t worry too much about this though because at least your first ten drawings are likely to be very disappointing, not as good as you would like them to be, after putting in what feels like a lot of hard work and this can be very disheartening.

 

There is a solution to this problem, that makes it easy to draw or lets not say easy but much easier to understand, at first in the beginning.

Firstly please let me show you something, below you will find a video that I would like you to watch, it is a video of me drawing free hand by coping from a picture I found online. As you will see in the video I am drawing this subject from scratch onto a blank piece of paper.

As you will have seen if you watched the above video, this particular drawing has a number of complicated shapes because of the angle that the subject is situated in. There are seven ellipses, which are the circles of the revolving bullet chambers and bullet chambers themselves, with two bullets in the two top chambers, these are difficult to draw for all artists.

If a beginner tried to draw this, they would almost certainly get it wrong. Why they would get it wrong is because the round shapes are not round, they might look round but they are not, they are actually slightly oval in shape. If a beginner tried to draw this, a number of things would happen, they would get those ellipse shapes wrong, they would spend a lot of time trying to get them right.

They would probably ruin the paper, from all the rubbing out they would be doing trying to get it right and end up with a drawing, that did not look good. This would demotivate them and they might even decide that they can’t draw, give up and never try again, that would be a big loss to them.

At this point most people leave this site and I think it is because they do no believe what I am going to tell them next.

Before you leave, please take a look at the additional information on this site, there is an extensive list down the right hand side and a drop down categories menu, towards the top of the page on the same side.

The solution to this problem is so simple, they teach it in primary school to children but the only problem with this is, as young children we are not capable of understanding the concept of composition, tonal variation, perspective, ellipses, three dimensional shape or perspective correctly.  The result is, that much of this knowledge is wasted because it is more interesting to play around and just enjoy the doing.

You see when we draw, we tend to draw a basic outline and then keep building onto that, so as to create our image, picture or drawing, we do this by looking and trying to copy what we see but we often do not really understand, what we can see. Like I said already, those ellipses look round, when they are not, they are oval.

Another problem for beginners is that when drawing, we are looking at the object, then at our pencil and hand doing the drawing in rapid succession and it is difficult. We don’t usually do this in our every day life, so we have to learn to look with intent.

This can be very frustrating and difficult at first because if we are doing something with our hands, then we tend to look at our hands. We get carried away looking at them, especially because we are doing something.

We tend to do this, instead of looking at what it is we are trying to draw, we are looking at our drawing and making it up because we are not looking at the object, we are trying draw.  We do not understand the shapes correctly and so when we look back, at the subject we are trying to draw, it is wrong, it is not very accurate because we weren’t looking.

This is part of the reasons, why we mess things up in the beginning because in the beginning  drawing is very complicated. This is true because not only are you having to multitask but also teach yourself new habits, while trying to break your natural instincts, to look at what your doing.

The easy draw solution to this problem, that they teach in primary schools, that we could never really understand, is tracing because when you are tracing pictures, you are looking at the object with intent, at the same time as using your hands to draw it, so this makes it much easier to habitualize other skills, while still learning about looking.

Tracing enables you to relax, it enables you to see how things really look and learn in an easy step by step draw system, that helps you grow with your confidence, instead of stressing yourself out, trying to understand too many skills at the same time.

Most people think tracing is not drawing but when you trace a picture, you are only drawing the outline and so there is still all the shading to do as well, to make the drawing more fully complete. You cannot trace shading and when you are doing it, trying to understand what you are doing by only looking, then by the time you get to do the shading, you are tired, feeling very demotivated.

That is why most people fail at drawing because not only do they not understand, what they are doing, they are also not able to do it well, so if you fail a few times, it reinforces failure, so you give up trying.

Learn to draw easy drawing methods.

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