Finally! One of the most inspiring and encouraging tutorials for a beginner. After many years of stop start drawing, you have, with your candid and ego-less sharing, helped me immensely on my learning and playing path. I'm so grateful. Thank you.
The "junk" sketchbook made me really happy to see honestly! It's inspirational in its own way, as I only started learning to draw a bit ago and am also mostly grinding out shapes. There truly is a lot more we could draw than one thinks, that 101 Sketching video was helpful but kind of overwhelming for someone who doesn't want to or can't put THAT much into drawing yet. Pinterest and similar sites where you can search for references, plus drawing right from life or photobooks has been my inspiration to get over "what should I draw when I can't draw?" Also, those tiny houses are adorable!
actually, i would LOVE to see the entirety of that mileage sketchbook! frankly, your art level beginning at the rocks and trees was already astounding!! after a year?!
THIS is exactly what I needed! Uncomplicated, clear explanation of your process is what’s so often missing in all those gorgeous sketchbook tours online. I’m hooked on them, but always miss a sense of how the artist actually *got* there. Thank you for your courage in sharing the very beginnings of your artist’s life. ❤️ (Also, your drawings are wonderful, inspiring and motivate me to try for myself-that’s all any beginner needs!)
This is just what's needed! Like others commented - these are real sketchbook tours that help beginners. I've been scribbling on loose sheets of paper, but your progression really shows why its helpful to have a book. Not only to see progression, but to revisit if a technique needs another look.
WoW this is so handy for me! I just turned on 54 and I started drawing in 2019….painting and mixed media spread on journals and even canevas without knowing anything about art. I just copy from artist and practice my way through. I founded very late that I love art. But you just give me the drive to keep up my journey. Thank you so much for showing us your very beginning as an artist. It helps a lot for getting confident in my journey ❤️❤️❤️👩🎨😃 (my mother tongue is not English…I do some mistakes there too!😂)
Thank you so much for making this :) I'm 17 & trying to make art and every time I saw beginner sketchbooks I would overfocus on trying to make mine look aesthetic. Seeing this is so refreshing & helpful. Thank you ❤
What you see advertised as sketchbooks are actually art books, designed to be finished pieces to be put on display. A sketchbook is a place to experiment and not finish everything, practice art fundamentals in isolation, plan art pieces, sketch ideas from which you select the best ones for the finished piece.
Don't really agree with this (other than the real high end ones). A sketchbook is whatever you use for sketching. Whether it's a hardcover, softcover, the noteblock you use for studying, whatever. It's not advertised as sketchbooks or artbooks, it's just that 99% of the content you see advertised on youtube as sketchbooks (tours) are just people using them as artbooks to show off. Hell, look at the sketchbooks of great artists, and you'll actually see sketches in them, studies, tests of materials and all the like, and many of them will be hardcovers which you'd consider "artbooks". (Of course the caveat, what you and i define as full artworks, can for those artists just be sketches :D) There's plenty of people actually using them as sketchbooks.
For someone that never had any interest in art before, your progres is honestly incredible! There's this ridiculous believe that talent is a gift, that you are born with, but that video is a great proof that is hard work and work that really pay off.
that's pretty much the reason I don't look at sketchbook tours anymore, it's all just beautiful completed pieces that just make me feel inferior and that I shouldn't even try because it'll never be me, this on the other hand is pretty inspirational and reaffirms that there is a beginning, thank you for sharing.
I'm sorry, but I am so impressed by your work and your work-ethics! Also, none of your sketchbooks is ugly. The one with the exercises is just wonderful. And the tree-book....!!!! Amazing. I am at the very beginning and I am just drawing lines and hatches. I want to built a strong fundament for the future, just like you! Repetition, muscle-memory, and theses breakthrough-moments is what I am aspiring, too. You are an inspiration, thank you so much for this great video
I really appreciate this video. I’m on a very similar path of having dipped in and out of learning for many years but now, at the age of 57, I’m doing lots of work on fundamental shapes and stuff that I’ve just never taken the time to learn well enough before. This video was very motivational with lots of good advice. It was also refreshing just to hear you talk without music playing in the background. Thanks for keeping it so real.
i love this video so much. i'm 45. i was super creative when i was a kid. drawing all the time, doing whatever i could get my hands on in the arts - dance, theatre, writing, you name it. as i got older, into my teens and especially afterward, there was just a really negative backlash against what was obviously my life's calling - making art. and i put it away and i have never been as into it since, and i've never been able to abandon myself to art with the absolute joy that i once had. i appreciate what you say about being a true beginner. although i'm no stranger to the feeling of a pencil in my hand, i feel like a beginner in the sense that the creative process, and the ability to let creativity into my life completely, has become so foreign to me that although i can duplicate a reference photo with near-perfect accuracy, when confronted with nothing but an empty page and my own imagination, i balk. my goal for myself is to develop my own visual library - my own reasons for doing this now, at 45 and beyond, that reignite the joy that i once felt, or whatever version of that that can now be available to me. i've never learned the basics. i imagine that would be a good place to start. i've heard of the draw a box program and i've been contemplating it. i resonate strongly with what you say about spending a couple or few years hammering out basics like this, really grasping the fundamentals so that i can start to feel confident about what i'm choosing to engage my time in. because i eventually want to feel good about everything i'm doing - which i want to include both challenging myself to learn a new skill or technique or material, as well as developing a visual language that feels familiar enough to me that i can draw with confidence from imagination.
Thank you for this, I've just made the decision to make time to draw every day. Hearing your ideas about what to draw is really helping me to clarify a goal, I think.
I've been drawing off and on over the years. I get into my drawing phases and then life gets busy and I get out of it again. I've been told I'm pretty good at drawing. My parents said I've been drawing since they first put a crayon in my hand at 2 years old.
😢Wow so great to see how you have worked -I wishI was as effective and consistent!!!! Ive been drawing maybe 4 years I have now.. . I draw almost every day but spread too much🙃consistent work really give results!!!
This is brilliant and thank you for the walk through, I never appreciated the beginner fundamentals until you showed us the 'boring' sketchbook (spoiler, it's not boring) I loved the little robot and the inktober prompts you did. I loved the towels and folds drawings, and I loved your nature drawings. This is coming from a 36 year old guy who's also learning to draw. I've been drawing on a 500 sheet stack of printer paper and you've given me a lot of inspiration what to practice.
You did amazing, I think! I've been drawing since I was 4 or 5 and I dont think I could do as good as you did ❤ that shows me I need to do this exercise too! :)
Thank you for this impressively honest and motivating report! It's impressive to see how your personal search with genuine interest and diligence bears fruit over time, but also how important it is to find "the right thing, the relevant thing" to practice and not just something that others tell you or show you. Nice to have found you on big TH-cam...
How refreshing - many thanks. I title my sketchbooks as ‘Ugly books’ then if the art is awful that’s fine, if it’s good that’s a bonus. I love to sketch whether good or bad. Much appreciate your chat 🙏
Thank you for sharing! I teach 5th and 6th grade art and I have used Mark Kistler for showing students how to draw 3d shapes too. So many adults say, "I can't draw ". This is proof that it is a skill to be learned, just like anything else!
I wish I'd been given something like the Kistler book at that age! It was a little juvenile for me when I actually used it, but I have to be honest, even at the age of 40 I found it very enjoyable! 😆
Really interesting! I'm a beginner (one and a half years in), and I'm working my way through my 6th sketchbook. I've been hopping around from interest to interest (while having a lot of fun). I admire how methodical you've been with learning!
Fantastic, the work, your talk and the sketchbooks. I think the most important this is, ti always be experimental and do not afraid to make missed takes
Charlotte, Very much enjoyed looking through your " junk sketchbook" . The forms and organic shapes are exactly what I have been working on over the past 6 months - after a long hiatus from drawing. Excellent examples and I hope you continue to share. Your attitude and work are truly inspirational to my quest to get better at drawing. Thanks, _Scott in N.C.
This video is now a year old and by this time, you're certainly much more advanced than you were when you created this wonderful, clear-eyed posting. I'm also wandering around online and in my sketchbooks trying to advance my meager native drawing ability. My experiences are quite similar to yours and I've come to realize that improvement comes by making drawings - any kind of drawings. The more the better. Draw whatever catches your eye - subject doesn't matter. (Discard nothing. Refer to it regularly to observe how much improved and to disprove your harsh internal critic.) What does matter is quantity and keeping the drawing challenge interesting. I have found that those whose work we admire as being "accomplished" have invested thousands of hours in practice, filling dozens and dozens of sketchbooks. Often they have an art education and often were encouraged at an early age to draw. I think we all have some artistic talent and it manifests in many ways but some have been more abundantly blessed than others. Sending you wishes for continued success and enjoyment in your art.
Way to go! I can’t imagine learning from scratch. All my life I just picked up pencils and crayons and dry erase markers or even strings and “drawn” things. I doodled on my tests at school out of boredom and in an attempt to focus better and it just always stayed w me. I never thought about how some folks might have to really look at it differently. But if I can say it here, I also never have been good at remembering body parts and related things. People w surgeries and descriptive illnesses or physical problems…they tell me and it goes in one ear and out another. Maybe it’s like they for you. Like buying health insurance. No clue at all. I’m glad you saw something worth grabbing hold of, though. Because you do actually have a sort of innate talent. Your drawings are fresh, crisp, calming (curiously so!) and really good. It’s been there all along. You just had to call it out! 👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻🦋
I think you are being far too modest; I loved seeing your sketchbooks and it was great to see how you developed as an artist! Thank you so much for sharing your journey on here.
As a sketchbook tour devotee (ok, junkie), this video landed in my feed and I'm so glad it did. Absolutely spot on commentary - most reviewed sketchbooks look like art portfolios, whereas mine look like something a chicken would produce if given sufficient drugs. Your work is fabulous, and I can tell you right now, you will be way beyond "moderately competent" in the not too distant future - I can see the talent from the get-go, despite your claims to the contrary. I love your channel, and thank you for posting your work. It gives me some artistic hope, and a template for meeting the same goal. ( p.s. As a retired geologist, I have to give you extra kudos for the fabulous rocks! )
Thank you so much, especially for your rock appreciation! I can't decide whether being a geologist will make you more likely to want to draw rocks (I imagine you appreciate a good rock formation more than average) or less (because you know too much and fear you will be distracted from drawing by contemplating great geological insights.). :D
Thank you so much for being so open and honest, it was refreshingly informative to learn about your journey into drawing, which I am doing too. I look forward to catching up and following you for future videos 🥰xxx
This video was very helpful for me I have been drawing for my whole life which is about 15 years but I only started building my skills a couple years ago. Whenever I would see a sketchbook tour it always made me feel discouraged because all the art in it was beautiful but that’s just not realistic not every piece of art you make is perfect and that’s okay. Thank you for making this video
Wow!! I love those sketchbooks!! The 100 day challenge one seems really great as well even if not that entertaining, I would love to flip through it... The funny thing is, I ap not a very professional artist but I do not consider myself a beginner either but I ap still unable to do what you considered the beginning of the artist journey... I cannot draw folded fabrics, I have a really really hard time with perspective, my rocks looks like square or weird sculpture but every side is wrong... But I did feel confident enough to write and illustrated a kid book for family and friend I produce stickers and a few other stuff with my art... And to me thats the biggest point in every artist journey: every little things that you draw gives you a little mire confidence and knowledge on yourself, now I know my weakness, what I need to work on and how I can cheat a bit to not draw something that I kbow will not look good... I m not sure if I progressed much in that actual drawing but I absolutely improve in recognizing all of this...
I absolutely love your honesty!!! You are exactly who and what I am searching for. I am an absolute beginner. I have so drawing talent what so ever unless you count stick figures . LOL
Fantastic video. Thank you so much for doing this. I love a sketchbook tour but it can be discouraging as a beginner to compare my messy sketchbooks with the accomplished stuff people showcase here. So thank you for the realistic correction!
You're welcome! That was exactly how I felt when I first started, so I decided to be the content I wish I had been able to find back when I was starting out.
See the funny thing for me is i was mostly a beginner i had taken a couple of classes in school learned a bit but hated it then a couple of years after i dropped out i start randomly wanting to draw when i was bored and i loved it now im a couple of months in and set aside a hour our two a day draw what i love and learing along the way bc i had the motivation to learn bc i wanted to draw what i was trying to and even when i mess up somtimes they turn out pretty cool
Finally! I'd watch these kind of sketchbook tours much more than the pretty ones. It's no freaking challenge when you can already draw nicely but... there's no journey. And that humble bragging: 'Oh, I still have a lot of things to learn...' Yeah, right. This tour makes it more human, more relatable for so many beginners, who struggle to see their art becoming something more than just attempts at drawing what they see. I enjoyed this tour immensely.
This was a refreshing video to watch. So often people avoid the grind and the exercises but like you I enjoy the 'monotonous' practices of lines and boxes in addition to drawing characters
This is such a nice video. I really enjoy watching sketchbook tours while drawing or painting myself and though I'm not a beginner anymore, your perspective on things and your level of realness is really inspirational. It was great listening to your words and seening all your creations, keep up the great work!
The one thing I feel strongly about for beginners is that you must have fun and enjoy what you are trying to do or why do it at all? If you want to get better then analyzing your work is important...I don't mean hateing on it...give it an honest look and don't say it is good or bad but say what do I like about this and what can I do to make it better NEXT time. IMO the biggest skill to have is patience...which I am usually in short supply of. Good art takes time. I (and all of us) really can draw anything or do anything if we have the patience to do so. I rarely want to spend enough time on it to do it as well as I know I can. That is my problem. Thanks for the video.
I definitely have that patience problem too. It's particularly bad when I'm learning to paint because I am so impatient for it to just be dry already so I can do the next bit!
I absolutely loved your video. You have an engaging, conversalionist style that made me feel like I was visiting a friend. I really enjoyed viewing your early works and found your methodology very interesting. In fact, I think I need to do something like that in order to see improvement in my own beginner's work. Thanks so much. Looking forward to seeing more of your videos.
I think that robot is a bit reminiscent of Rosie from The Jetsons. I think that this is probably pretty realistic, from what I understand about people who draw regularly. I think that you seemed embarrassed about drawing basic shapes over and over. This is nothing to be embarrassed about. The people who are the best at the fundamentals are going to be the best at the stuff that uses the fundamentals. This sounds like a "no duh" kind of statement, but they are fundamental for a reason. I didn't really draw when I was a kid with the exception of when I was in high school. My freshman, I had the absolute joy of learning from a brother of the holy cross. This man was pretty old compared to the rest of my teachers and unfortunately, many of the students in his class treated him with absolutely zero respect, but then again, he was teaching a bunch of freshmen. For anyone who gave him the slightest chance, this man opened up worlds and taught all kinds of amazing things like how to draw a 3D room in a building from a blueprint (or something like it as we just had top down drawings, no actual blueprints). He taught perspective and how to shade stuff and tips for drawing wood grain. That was over 30 years ago now and I still hold the skills I learned in that class in high esteem. Sadly, I haven't stayed on top of drawing much after that. I hadn't even really thought about it much until my most recent girlfriend. Her whole family were pretty great at drawing including my girlfriend who would very occasionally draw something for me. A few years back, I got some sketch books and pencils for us to draw as a nice activity for us to do. She actually was impressed by my skill for not having drawn in so many years. Unfortunately, the activity was not very regular and I also wonder if she was afraid of the degradation in her skills as she had some health issues where a medicine she was on gave her a tremor. Then a little over a year ago, she had a heart attack and fell into a coma. When she came out, she didn't have much strength in her hand to pick up a pencil. I don't think I have ever seen her draw since. She died early last month, so I will never get to see another one of her drawings. I still have some blank sketch pads of my own and have given some serious thought to getting back into drawing. I feel like I owe her carrying on our shared hobby, even if we didn't do it that often or for that long.
Thank you for all of your wonderful insight. I am learning to draw for the first time. I would love to hear more about the sketchbook with the 100 days of exercises. How did you know those were foundational skills in the first place? I feel like compared to you I'm a -10 in the beginner level of drawing. I'm not sure where to even begin at the moment. All I know is that I have a paper, I have a pen, and I don't have a lot of time, but I have a passion to learn. ❤❤ Any advice would be greatly appreciated
Hi! Glad you found my video useful. So, if you're RIGHT at the beginning, you haven't drawn at all or not since you were at school, I think Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain by Betty Edwards is fun. Just... don't take the dodgy neuroscience as gospel truth. I bought the "workbook" variant of the book, and it was a genuine joy to go from the "before" to the "after" with the self-portrait. If you google it, you'll see really great examples of that before/after exercise online and I think mine is somewhere in this video as well. When I started, I genuinely was like, ha, that is OTHER people, not me, I'll never be able to do that, but it actually truly worked. Such a huge confidence boost and like I said, a joy to draw something successfully after very little time. I personally found it to be a very low time commitment and it's fairly inexpensive as these things go. I think I spent about 25-30 hours on the book in total over the course of about a month. It does not really try to give you too many technical drawing skills, but it will give you a chance to experience making a drawing, which is really helpful at this very early stage. If you're a bit past that point, then as far as the foundational exercises from my 100 day sketchbook are concerned, they were taken from online courses/videos that I watched or followed. I can tell you about the ones I did, but I think it's worth acknowledging that sometimes you just can't get on with some particular teacher's style or presentation, and it's worth shopping around a bit to find someone who presents the ideas in a way that works better for you. The basics themselves are really well-known and established, so there's not actually a huge difference in WHAT is being taught up to a certain point, so what you're looking for is a WAY that it's taught that really works for you. So, my personal favourites were: 1. Drawabox (www.drawabox.com). This whole approach to drawing comes out of fields like product design and architecture, and it feels more analytical and technical in many ways than other courses. I am quite analytical in the way I approach things, and I therefore found this course almost comforting when I was a beginner -- it managed to make what is often described in very non-analytical terms (beauty, style, feeling, imagination) more understandable. However, this ultimately wore thin for me once it got into drawing actual things (plants, animals, etc) and I never finished the course. And for other people that more technical/clinical approach never suits them at all. However, I think the first part of Drawabox (lessons 1 and 2, which cover lines, shapes, volumes, basic perspective) is brilliant. It does feel a little technical and dry (even the course creator acknowledges that very clearly in Lesson 0) and you definitely need to pace yourself so you don't burn out on grinding the longer exercises, but it's really basic and foundational, and a LOT of the exercises in my 100 day sketchbook are drawn from foundational skills I learned from it. For me personally, as a real beginner, JUST doing the 8 pages per exercise or whatever it was that Drawabox recommended was not nearly enough, but doing a whole 200 pages in that sketchbook was transformational. Pros: It's free, or close to free, very low barriers to entry (a pen and some paper), very well-established. Cons: It can feel very grind-y, especially things like the 250 Boxes challenge. For me personally, although I did lesson 3 (plants) and most of 4 (insects) I started not to like the pedagogy or teaching style as much, and when (for unrelated reasons) I stopped drawing for a while, I never went back to it when I started again. But those first two lessons would give you loads of things to work on actively that will underpin ALL your future drawings (lines, shapes, volumes) no matter what style of art you do in future (Okay, maybe not if you go into abstracts...) For someone short on time I think it is quite useful, because it is definitely the sort of thing you could work on in bite-size chunks. I had so many random sheets of paper scattered around where I'd spend ~20 mins a day just working on some very simple exercises. 2. Brent Eviston's series of courses on Skillshare "The Art and Science of Drawing". So, if Drawabox comes out of the product design tradition, Brent Eviston comes more from the classical drawing tradition. I liked his delivery of information, which is very methodical and flows very cleanly from topic to topic. He covers some familiar ground from Drawabox (lines, volumes), but some other new things (shading, measuring) and also he approaches it in a different way, with a slightly different type of explanation and a different medium (pencil rather than fineliner in DAB) which I found helpful. I finished the course and even re-did a couple of sections. I also like his basic figure drawing course (Art and science of Figure Drawing) but I'd recommend you do the more foundational course before that even if you only ever want to draw people. The courses are fairly bite-size, and you could definitely spend ~15-20 mins watching a short video in the course, and then fitting in another 15-30mins here and there working on it over the course of a week. I will say this type of more classic artist training course is *extremely* common -- you can certainly find a similar sort of course taught in a broadly similar way on many other major online platforms. Some examples: Proko.com, specifically Stan Prokopenko's basics course. It is $$ for the "premium version" but there's a LOT of free content on his site, and it is VERY bite-sized and easy to digest. Personally, I find his delivery overall quite irritating for no really rational reason, so I've never followed a whole course of his, but it's definitely well-designed and a lot of people LOVE his teaching delivery, so it's worth a look. Plus there are online art schools like NMA ($$), Watts' Atelier ($$$) , CGMA ($$$$) etc. Personally, I picked the Skillshare class because of the ubiquitous TH-camr "one month free" Skillshare offers meant a low cost of entry, and I think it's worth investigating the free month just to try the course out -- you can always cancel before you have to pay anything. I tried some similar NMA classes at one point, but there's a bigger upfront cost, and again, I didn't love the way some of those fundamentals classes were taught. (I bet I sound super fussy about watching some videos, but I think because I am in education myself and often professionally required to sit through people delivering information badly, I have very low tolerance for doing more of it in my free time!) There are also LOADS of books on this topic if you're more of a book learner. A book I liked along these lines was: "Drawing For the Absolute and Utter Beginner" by C Watson Garcia. Again, this covers pretty much exactly the same ground. You might also want to look into in person "Intro to Drawing" classes in local colleges (or whatever equivalent where you live) -- there are several offered near me for quite a small fee, but I was learning in 2020 so it wasn't an option. Although it sounds like a huge time commitment if you're already time poor, an American friend of mine who is insanely busy did one at a local community college and she found it was great -- just scheduling the time and setting up things like it was her husband's responsibility to feed the kids that night meant she felt like she had to go do it. She ended up going to I think all but one class in the whole semester as a result. So, you know, worth thinking about if you enjoy the in-person classroom experience and would enjoy meeting other beginner artists. If you look at everything I've suggested and you're like, nope, no, nope, then a quick search will turn up a dozen more options to consider. You are looking for something that covers: lines (sometimes called "mark-making"), shapes, volumes, cross-contours and shading (or "light" or something similar) and probably measuring or something similar. I would say overall, there are two cautionary notes I'd offer you: 1. Try not to make the technical drills the main or the only thing you do, because while they are really useful and will build skills, and they are super easy to do when you only have a short time to practice, they probably aren't REALLY what you want to spend all your time drawing and you WILL burn out and get bored. I am not saying this like I avoided this mistake, because although I did things like my books of trees and houses I honestly did not do as much of that kind of drawing as I probably should have early on. It's just something to have in your mind. 2. Patience and practice is hard and often feels extremely unrewarding, but it WILL pay off. There are things I can do now with a piece of paper and a pencil that I could NEVER have imagined I would EVER do back when I was struggling through DAB Lesson 1, trying to draw straight-ish lines. Think about your assumption that you started your comment with -- I must have had a head start on you, somehow. I really didn't. REALLY. No "talent", no skills from a hobby that has something in common with drawing, nothing. So truly, anything I have done is purely down to practice, time, and effort, all of it after I turned 40, and thus it is also within your reach. Wow, that was an essay! Anyway, I hope you found something in it useful and I hope you really enjoy drawing once you get started!
This video is great, I'm a complete beginner and have been getting frustrated just drawing random stuff and not looking how I see it in my head, I think shapes and volumes best place to start
Thank you, I am also this type of genuine beginner, well... advanced beginner so to say at this point. It was really refreshing to see someone who is not an architect/designer/or any other “art” related field person to be starting out later in their life like I do ❤ and REALLY starting from zero, as I do ❤
Glad you enjoyed it. I agree -- I have nothing against people coming to drawing from a creative background, but it was always hard to see myself in their experiences/videos.
Thanks for showing us this book💕 what e development! Maybe you could make a book for beginners? I have never seen such a book. Either it ist for faces, Figures, trees, houses, landscapes or anything else. But you put all together to learn a little bit from everything and the eyrything came together. I adore your discipline and happiness and your effort. Thanks again, for showing ist. One question: have you ever used an eraser or did you chance your mind if there was a „wrong“ stroke, which you would not like in that picture, which what not fit it that picture? Did you think „ um, what could that now become?“ or „how can I change it it to feel it right again for me?“ Thanks again for your explanation of your way of development development🙏👏👏👏👏💕
Thx for this inspiring video. Even your first drawings, with the Mark Kistler book, looked very good and clean. Not at al like a beginner as me hehe. I started drawing in my teens, just copying anime. Gave up quickly and picked it up a few times over the many years, but only in times my normal routine of life changed, like you said. During covidtimes, being 35y old then, i started with the draw a box lessons. Drew a page or 2 during my lunchbreak at work or so. The organic forms were fun, but i still gave up. I have many empty sketchbooks i don't want to mess up hehe. My main interest is trees, realistic or not, any sort... Seeing your tree sketchbook was the most versatile i've seen and i LOVE it! They all look so good and not at all as 'beginner sketches'. The last book you showed is what my first attempt to start learning looks like too, but i never hang in there. Even though i at least think of drawing once or twice a day!! I just never take the time to do even 1 little drawing, cause '' it will look like crap anyway ''. That's the worst attitude and will not get me anywhere, i know. But you got me motivated again 🙏🧡 thx!!
I think I mentioned in the video that I tried drawing on and off for 4 years before I finally knuckled down and started drawing consistently, so I definitely sympathise! It's really hard to keep going when you're discouraged by your results all the time. I really recommend the John Muir Laws tree drawing video as a starting point if you're keen to draw them: johnmuirlaws.com/draw-trees-video-workshop/
While the "pretty" sketchbook tours are very lovely to look at, they were really damaging to my thought processes surrounding sketchbooks. I have to keep reminding myself my sketchbook is a space for me to learn, experiment, and try new things. A record of my progress! I tried DrawABox towards the end of 2021, and failed spectacularly when I started rotating boxes. I really struggle to wrap my brain around 3D shapes. I also don't "get" gesture drawing yet. It's a struggle trying to find that resource or exercise that makes things "click" for me as it were.
Adult beginner artists without any art background!! Your video really resonated with me as I am on a very similar journey, including feeling the need to share it online. I don’t seem to do as much technical practice :) I like to get messy with it :) You can definitely tell how that practice has paid off for you. Thank you for sharing your sketchbooks and your thoughts!
You’re a beginner? Wow! I thoroughly enjoyed your video. I, that’s me (not sure what others think), didn’t think I was a beginner, but now I’m not so sure. I have drawn since childhood and at school I could finish to of my class in the Art lesson and I could sometimes drop down a division, so like you, it didn’t matter about art when I left school. I only took it up again when I saw someone’s drawing (painting?) on Flickr of a cat done in pastel pencil and now I use those most of the time. Not really been into sketchbooks, but my daughter bought me a “Sketch a Day” A5 size book and I now work with that (not necessarily every day though). I really liked your video which has provoked me into doing a little more with a sketchbook. I only came across this video when the thumbnail popped up on my screen. I have now subscribed.
I loved your idea on trees and rocks, I'm curious the angular or modern tree styles that you drew what is that called and where did you get the idea for the shapes?
Fantastic Video!, the trees and robot book composition look great!! Q: in the 150 day junk book, did you use an eraser a lot or just keep sketching the shapes? (signed...56yr old beginner)
In the junk sketchbook, after the first couple of pages I didn't use an eraser at all, I just kept moving across the page. It did take me those first couple of days to settle into the no-erasing mindset, but once I did I don't think I ever used an eraser again. In general, I think when you decide whether to erase or not you should ask yourself whether it matters if this *specific* drawing is correct. So, if I was filling a practice page full of cylinders in a junk sketchbook, erasing was a waste of time because it really didn't matter if any specific cylinder was bad, or even, at the start, if the whole page of cylinders turned out bad. My goal in that sketchbook was not to produce pages full of well-drawn cylinders, it was to learn and practice the techniques of cylinder drawing -- drawing the ellipse, making it look like it is in perspective, etc -- so that in the future, I could draw a cylinder in any position and any perspective right first time with no erasing or corrections. In this mindset a cylinder with a big mistake is just a data point ("this cylinder looks wonky because the ellipse is too flat") that I used to improve how I drew the next cylinder ("I'm going to draw the same cylinder, but draw the ellipse differently"). My focus was not on correcting a mistake I had already made, but trying not to make it again, and then later, my focus was not on being pleased with a good cylinder, but making sure that I knew what made it more successful that previous attempts, and also that I could keep drawing it successfully any time I wanted. In the end, of course, with enough practice I did end up with pages of well-drawn cylinders, but it's not because I spent hours on one page, carefully drawing, erasing and correcting each line and ellipse on each cylinder. It's because I drew pages and pages and PAGES of bad cylinders and then better cylinders and then good cylinders, until drawing a good page of cylinders is just something I can do now, without much effort. On the other hand, if I was working on the early stages of what I hoped would be a finished pen and ink drawing of a tree, and I was drawing a cylinder as an underdrawing of the trunk and it went a bit wonky, I would erase and correct my drawing. Getting that drawing right MATTERS: I know that no matter how well my subsequent details on the tree turn out, it's never going to look right if my underlying cylinder is bad. At some point my practice pages of cylinders started to pay off because as I improved at the basic skills, I made fewer mistakes and spent less time correcting my underdrawings, and could spend more time on the parts of the drawing that are more fun. Sorry, that reply got long! Hope it helps!
Thank you! There are some notes in the description box about some of my materials, but honestly I use mostly very common, inexpensive tools. I'll maybe do a specific art supplies video however in the near future, thank you for the idea!
I am looking at doing a fundamental sketchbook of my own where did you find the information from. Was it youtube or books? I use to have skills but put of drawing for some reason so now I want to put in the time to redevelop the basics
Honestly, I had no single source. A lot of my fundamentals practice came from the early phases of Draw A Box (drawabox.com), and then also from various beginner/fundamentals courses and books -- I went into these in a bit more detail in my "Drawing Starting Point" video. You can't really go wrong though with focussing at least a bit on line quality, basic shapes and basic volumes as a starting point. My experience was that as I worked on other topics in other sketchbooks, I'd run across small basic skills that I needed more practice on, and I'd just incorporate that into my practice sketchbook.
Yes! The Walt Stanchfield thing! "We all have 10,000 bad drawings in us. The sooner we get them out the better." I love that too, though I admit I am always concerned that maybe there won't be anything good even when I'm 10,001 drawings in 😆
lots of things resonated with me here! I also did the DAB, I enjoyed it too. Not knowing what to draw and that it's never too late to learn what you want, i've also started sharing my journey online too! I love your sketches, actually I feel they are really good for someone who has started totally from scratch. I'm curious, how many years was this done over? I look forward to seeing more of your videos!
Thanks! It's a bit complicated to say how much time I put into those particular sketchbooks. The video is mostly chronological, although a few of my sketchbooks overlapped. From the point where I started work on DAB until the end of the video is about 16 months by the calendar, but I did not do any art practice at all for 6 of those months. Before that, I did a few weeks at a time here and there over a period of 4 years -- probably a total of 8-10 weeks, but very very spread out. So depending on your point of view, it either took 6 years or about 12 months.
@@charlottebrown1975 its so great to see other learners sharing their work. I have also started to share my art progress and beginnings on youtube too. Its so great to be on a platform where there are other learners sharing their work. I feel like we are growing together!
I think your sketchbooks and the large one with all the repetitive sketches are fantastic. It makes me sad that you kept saying that they weren’t. Perhaps stand back and look again and you’ll finally see for yourself.
My art teacher always told us to draw things from our environment, things we knew well because we saw them often and were easy to reach/find and spend time studying them. He really made us see how interesting can be to draw small ordinary items. He also told us to keep making these sketches even if we didn't plan to paint anything important. Just a few minutes every day, or one or two items every day. It became a habit for me to think what would be next item once I finished the previous one. It made practice fun.
Thank you! I actually did start learning to draw the figure in mid-2021 -- it didn't get a mention here because I was only just starting out and my figure drawings never made it into these sketchbooks 😁
I’m still very new to drawing and have followed people advise to do drawabox but I feel it doesn’t apply to what I’m drawing because I’m not drawing buildings or boxes. What I don’t see much videos is about form construction and form deconstruction. I think this is the most important. If you can do forms you are half way there. But I still have not found any in depth videos about forms construction, what to practice, how to practice a study, how to then make your own drawings from imagination
never thought of buying book for drawing.. i'm very new, 30yr old adult and i draw like a 13 yr old i only copy some drawings on google images🫠🫠 there was no encouragement on any hobbies whatsoever when i was a kid. i only began experimenting on hobbies like this lately😢 i should learn with a book from now on.. thats what lacking of me..
![[PaperDIY] Incredibox Sprunki Simon's Growing Up Sticker Book Decorating ASMR](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/Vj5Ax5BTgSU/mqdefault.jpg)
Your framing on the hours invested in drilling basic skills vs the hours of enjoyment in future decades has gotten my wheels turning. Thank you.
Finally! One of the most inspiring and encouraging tutorials for a beginner. After many years of stop start drawing, you have, with your candid and ego-less sharing, helped me immensely on my learning and playing path. I'm so grateful. Thank you.
Thank you, what a wonderful comment to read! I hope your own art journey brings you a lot of joy 😊
The "junk" sketchbook made me really happy to see honestly! It's inspirational in its own way, as I only started learning to draw a bit ago and am also mostly grinding out shapes. There truly is a lot more we could draw than one thinks, that 101 Sketching video was helpful but kind of overwhelming for someone who doesn't want to or can't put THAT much into drawing yet. Pinterest and similar sites where you can search for references, plus drawing right from life or photobooks has been my inspiration to get over "what should I draw when I can't draw?"
Also, those tiny houses are adorable!
actually, i would LOVE to see the entirety of that mileage sketchbook! frankly, your art level beginning at the rocks and trees was already astounding!! after a year?!
THIS is exactly what I needed! Uncomplicated, clear explanation of your process is what’s so often missing in all those gorgeous sketchbook tours online. I’m hooked on them, but always miss a sense of how the artist actually *got* there. Thank you for your courage in sharing the very beginnings of your artist’s life. ❤️ (Also, your drawings are wonderful, inspiring and motivate me to try for myself-that’s all any beginner needs!)
I'm so glad you found it useful! Best of luck with your own sketchbook adventures!
This is just what's needed! Like others commented - these are real sketchbook tours that help beginners. I've been scribbling on loose sheets of paper, but your progression really shows why its helpful to have a book. Not only to see progression, but to revisit if a technique needs another look.
WoW this is so handy for me! I just turned on 54 and I started drawing in 2019….painting and mixed media spread on journals and even canevas without knowing anything about art. I just copy from artist and practice my way through. I founded very late that I love art. But you just give me the drive to keep up my journey. Thank you so much for showing us your very beginning as an artist. It helps a lot for getting confident in my journey ❤️❤️❤️👩🎨😃 (my mother tongue is not English…I do some mistakes there too!😂)
That sounds great! Good luck with your continued art practice! 😊
Thank you so much for making this :) I'm 17 & trying to make art and every time I saw beginner sketchbooks I would overfocus on trying to make mine look aesthetic. Seeing this is so refreshing & helpful. Thank you ❤
What you see advertised as sketchbooks are actually art books, designed to be finished pieces to be put on display. A sketchbook is a place to experiment and not finish everything, practice art fundamentals in isolation, plan art pieces, sketch ideas from which you select the best ones for the finished piece.
Don't really agree with this (other than the real high end ones). A sketchbook is whatever you use for sketching. Whether it's a hardcover, softcover, the noteblock you use for studying, whatever. It's not advertised as sketchbooks or artbooks, it's just that 99% of the content you see advertised on youtube as sketchbooks (tours) are just people using them as artbooks to show off. Hell, look at the sketchbooks of great artists, and you'll actually see sketches in them, studies, tests of materials and all the like, and many of them will be hardcovers which you'd consider "artbooks". (Of course the caveat, what you and i define as full artworks, can for those artists just be sketches :D)
There's plenty of people actually using them as sketchbooks.
For someone that never had any interest in art before, your progres is honestly incredible! There's this ridiculous believe that talent is a gift, that you are born with, but that video is a great proof that is hard work and work that really pay off.
Finally a normal sketchbook! Not a little portfolio of beautiful artwork I'm trying to pass as an sketch on youtube
I love your honesty and admire your encouragement to not give up.
that's pretty much the reason I don't look at sketchbook tours anymore, it's all just beautiful completed pieces that just make me feel inferior and that I shouldn't even try because it'll never be me, this on the other hand is pretty inspirational and reaffirms that there is a beginning, thank you for sharing.
I'm sorry, but I am so impressed by your work and your work-ethics! Also, none of your sketchbooks is ugly. The one with the exercises is just wonderful. And the tree-book....!!!! Amazing. I am at the very beginning and I am just drawing lines and hatches. I want to built a strong fundament for the future, just like you! Repetition, muscle-memory, and theses breakthrough-moments is what I am aspiring, too. You are an inspiration, thank you so much for this great video
Thank you! I am glad you liked my sketchbooks! Best of luck with your drawing journey.
Thank you!
I really appreciate this video. I’m on a very similar path of having dipped in and out of learning for many years but now, at the age of 57, I’m doing lots of work on fundamental shapes and stuff that I’ve just never taken the time to learn well enough before. This video was very motivational with lots of good advice. It was also refreshing just to hear you talk without music playing in the background. Thanks for keeping it so real.
I love your tree sketches.
Having an extra sketchbook for warmups and technical exercises is such a good idea! Definitely going to do this as well
i love this video so much.
i'm 45. i was super creative when i was a kid. drawing all the time, doing whatever i could get my hands on in the arts - dance, theatre, writing, you name it. as i got older, into my teens and especially afterward, there was just a really negative backlash against what was obviously my life's calling - making art. and i put it away and i have never been as into it since, and i've never been able to abandon myself to art with the absolute joy that i once had.
i appreciate what you say about being a true beginner. although i'm no stranger to the feeling of a pencil in my hand, i feel like a beginner in the sense that the creative process, and the ability to let creativity into my life completely, has become so foreign to me that although i can duplicate a reference photo with near-perfect accuracy, when confronted with nothing but an empty page and my own imagination, i balk. my goal for myself is to develop my own visual library - my own reasons for doing this now, at 45 and beyond, that reignite the joy that i once felt, or whatever version of that that can now be available to me.
i've never learned the basics. i imagine that would be a good place to start. i've heard of the draw a box program and i've been contemplating it. i resonate strongly with what you say about spending a couple or few years hammering out basics like this, really grasping the fundamentals so that i can start to feel confident about what i'm choosing to engage my time in. because i eventually want to feel good about everything i'm doing - which i want to include both challenging myself to learn a new skill or technique or material, as well as developing a visual language that feels familiar enough to me that i can draw with confidence from imagination.
Thank you for this, I've just made the decision to make time to draw every day. Hearing your ideas about what to draw is really helping me to clarify a goal, I think.
That's great! I hope you have a lot of fun with your new sketchbook habit! 😊
I've been drawing off and on over the years. I get into my drawing phases and then life gets busy and I get out of it again. I've been told I'm pretty good at drawing. My parents said I've been drawing since they first put a crayon in my hand at 2 years old.
😢Wow so great to see how you have worked -I wishI was as effective and consistent!!!! Ive been drawing maybe 4 years I have now.. . I draw almost every day but spread too much🙃consistent work really give results!!!
This is brilliant and thank you for the walk through, I never appreciated the beginner fundamentals until you showed us the 'boring' sketchbook (spoiler, it's not boring) I loved the little robot and the inktober prompts you did. I loved the towels and folds drawings, and I loved your nature drawings. This is coming from a 36 year old guy who's also learning to draw.
I've been drawing on a 500 sheet stack of printer paper and you've given me a lot of inspiration what to practice.
Thank you! Glad you enjoyed it!
You did amazing, I think! I've been drawing since I was 4 or 5 and I dont think I could do as good as you did ❤ that shows me I need to do this exercise too! :)
Thank you for this impressively honest and motivating report! It's impressive to see how your personal search with genuine interest and diligence bears fruit over time, but also how important it is to find "the right thing, the relevant thing" to practice and not just something that others tell you or show you. Nice to have found you on big TH-cam...
How refreshing - many thanks. I title my sketchbooks as ‘Ugly books’ then if the art is awful that’s fine, if it’s good that’s a bonus. I love to sketch whether good or bad. Much appreciate your chat 🙏
Thank you!
I love this! Thank you.
Thank you for sharing! I teach 5th and 6th grade art and I have used Mark Kistler for showing students how to draw 3d shapes too. So many adults say, "I can't draw ". This is proof that it is a skill to be learned, just like anything else!
I wish I'd been given something like the Kistler book at that age! It was a little juvenile for me when I actually used it, but I have to be honest, even at the age of 40 I found it very enjoyable! 😆
Really interesting! I'm a beginner (one and a half years in), and I'm working my way through my 6th sketchbook. I've been hopping around from interest to interest (while having a lot of fun). I admire how methodical you've been with learning!
Thanks! Glad you're enjoying learning as well!
This is great! I love seeing honest beginnings and seeing how people have been able to improve through regular practice.
Thanks! Glad you enjoyed it!
Fantastic, the work, your talk and the sketchbooks. I think the most important this is, ti always be experimental and do not afraid to make missed takes
Charlotte,
Very much enjoyed looking through your " junk sketchbook" . The forms and
organic shapes are exactly what I have been working on over the past 6 months - after a long hiatus from drawing.
Excellent examples and I hope you continue to share. Your attitude and work are truly inspirational to my
quest to get better at drawing.
Thanks,
_Scott in N.C.
Glad you found it useful! Best of luck with your drawing!
This video is now a year old and by this time, you're certainly much more advanced than you were when you created this wonderful, clear-eyed posting. I'm also wandering around online and in my sketchbooks trying to advance my meager native drawing ability. My experiences are quite similar to yours and I've come to realize that improvement comes by making drawings - any kind of drawings. The more the better. Draw whatever catches your eye - subject doesn't matter. (Discard nothing. Refer to it regularly to observe how much improved and to disprove your harsh internal critic.)
What does matter is quantity and keeping the drawing challenge interesting. I have found that those whose work we admire as being "accomplished" have invested thousands of hours in practice, filling dozens and dozens of sketchbooks. Often they have an art education and often were encouraged at an early age to draw. I think we all have some artistic talent and it manifests in many ways but some have been more abundantly blessed than others. Sending you wishes for continued success and enjoyment in your art.
I enjoyed watching your sketchbook journey.
Glad you enjoyed it!
Way to go! I can’t imagine learning from scratch. All my life I just picked up pencils and crayons and dry erase markers or even strings and “drawn” things. I doodled on my tests at school out of boredom and in an attempt to focus better and it just always stayed w me. I never thought about how some folks might have to really look at it differently. But if I can say it here, I also never have been good at remembering body parts and related things. People w surgeries and descriptive illnesses or physical problems…they tell me and it goes in one ear and out another. Maybe it’s like they for you. Like buying health insurance. No clue at all. I’m glad you saw something worth grabbing hold of, though. Because you do actually have a sort of innate talent. Your drawings are fresh, crisp, calming (curiously so!) and really good. It’s been there all along. You just had to call it out! 👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻🦋
Excellent video! ❤
Charlotte thanks for a great video. I’m a beginner too and you inspired and engaged me! Thanks!
I think you are being far too modest; I loved seeing your sketchbooks and it was great to see how you developed as an artist! Thank you so much for sharing your journey on here.
As a sketchbook tour devotee (ok, junkie), this video landed in my feed and I'm so glad it did. Absolutely spot on commentary - most reviewed sketchbooks look like art portfolios, whereas mine look like something a chicken would produce if given sufficient drugs. Your work is fabulous, and I can tell you right now, you will be way beyond "moderately competent" in the not too distant future - I can see the talent from the get-go, despite your claims to the contrary. I love your channel, and thank you for posting your work. It gives me some artistic hope, and a template for meeting the same goal. ( p.s. As a retired geologist, I have to give you extra kudos for the fabulous rocks! )
Thank you so much, especially for your rock appreciation! I can't decide whether being a geologist will make you more likely to want to draw rocks (I imagine you appreciate a good rock formation more than average) or less (because you know too much and fear you will be distracted from drawing by contemplating great geological insights.). :D
Thank you so much for being so open and honest, it was refreshingly informative to learn about your journey into drawing, which I am doing too. I look forward to catching up and following you for future videos 🥰xxx
This video was very helpful for me I have been drawing for my whole life which is about 15 years but I only started building my skills a couple years ago. Whenever I would see a sketchbook tour it always made me feel discouraged because all the art in it was beautiful but that’s just not realistic not every piece of art you make is perfect and that’s okay. Thank you for making this video
Glad it was helpful!
Wow!!
I love those sketchbooks!! The 100 day challenge one seems really great as well even if not that entertaining, I would love to flip through it...
The funny thing is, I ap not a very professional artist but I do not consider myself a beginner either but I ap still unable to do what you considered the beginning of the artist journey... I cannot draw folded fabrics, I have a really really hard time with perspective, my rocks looks like square or weird sculpture but every side is wrong... But I did feel confident enough to write and illustrated a kid book for family and friend I produce stickers and a few other stuff with my art... And to me thats the biggest point in every artist journey: every little things that you draw gives you a little mire confidence and knowledge on yourself, now I know my weakness, what I need to work on and how I can cheat a bit to not draw something that I kbow will not look good... I m not sure if I progressed much in that actual drawing but I absolutely improve in recognizing all of this...
Thank you for sharing. This video is so relatable. I identify with a lot that you say and it’s nice to see it represented.
I absolutely love your honesty!!! You are exactly who and what I am searching for. I am an absolute beginner. I have so drawing talent what so ever unless you count stick figures . LOL
This was very helpful. Maybe now I will take heart and begin work on my secret project. Thanks for posting this!
Fantastic video. Thank you so much for doing this. I love a sketchbook tour but it can be discouraging as a beginner to compare my messy sketchbooks with the accomplished stuff people showcase here. So thank you for the realistic correction!
You're welcome! That was exactly how I felt when I first started, so I decided to be the content I wish I had been able to find back when I was starting out.
See the funny thing for me is i was mostly a beginner i had taken a couple of classes in school learned a bit but hated it then a couple of years after i dropped out i start randomly wanting to draw when i was bored and i loved it now im a couple of months in and set aside a hour our two a day draw what i love and learing along the way bc i had the motivation to learn bc i wanted to draw what i was trying to and even when i mess up somtimes they turn out pretty cool
You have natural talent
Thanks!
Finally! I'd watch these kind of sketchbook tours much more than the pretty ones. It's no freaking challenge when you can already draw nicely but... there's no journey. And that humble bragging: 'Oh, I still have a lot of things to learn...' Yeah, right.
This tour makes it more human, more relatable for so many beginners, who struggle to see their art becoming something more than just attempts at drawing what they see.
I enjoyed this tour immensely.
Thank you, glad you enjoyed it!
This was a refreshing video to watch. So often people avoid the grind and the exercises but like you I enjoy the 'monotonous' practices of lines and boxes in addition to drawing characters
Glad you enjoyed it!
This is such a nice video. I really enjoy watching sketchbook tours while drawing or painting myself and though I'm not a beginner anymore, your perspective on things and your level of realness is really inspirational. It was great listening to your words and seening all your creations, keep up the great work!
The one thing I feel strongly about for beginners is that you must have fun and enjoy what you are trying to do or why do it at all? If you want to get better then analyzing your work is important...I don't mean hateing on it...give it an honest look and don't say it is good or bad but say what do I like about this and what can I do to make it better NEXT time. IMO the biggest skill to have is patience...which I am usually in short supply of. Good art takes time. I (and all of us) really can draw anything or do anything if we have the patience to do so. I rarely want to spend enough time on it to do it as well as I know I can. That is my problem. Thanks for the video.
I definitely have that patience problem too. It's particularly bad when I'm learning to paint because I am so impatient for it to just be dry already so I can do the next bit!
You are very good and too hard on yourself! Your robot sketchbook is very fun! Your houses and trees are beautiful. Keep it up!
Thank you very much!
I absolutely loved your video. You have an engaging, conversalionist style that made me feel like I was visiting a friend. I really enjoyed viewing your early works and found your methodology very interesting. In fact, I think I need to do something like that in order to see improvement in my own beginner's work. Thanks so much. Looking forward to seeing more of your videos.
Thank you so much!
It is a really impressive and inspiring way, thanks for sharing❤
I think that robot is a bit reminiscent of Rosie from The Jetsons. I think that this is probably pretty realistic, from what I understand about people who draw regularly. I think that you seemed embarrassed about drawing basic shapes over and over. This is nothing to be embarrassed about. The people who are the best at the fundamentals are going to be the best at the stuff that uses the fundamentals. This sounds like a "no duh" kind of statement, but they are fundamental for a reason.
I didn't really draw when I was a kid with the exception of when I was in high school.
My freshman, I had the absolute joy of learning from a brother of the holy cross. This man was pretty old compared to the rest of my teachers and unfortunately, many of the students in his class treated him with absolutely zero respect, but then again, he was teaching a bunch of freshmen. For anyone who gave him the slightest chance, this man opened up worlds and taught all kinds of amazing things like how to draw a 3D room in a building from a blueprint (or something like it as we just had top down drawings, no actual blueprints). He taught perspective and how to shade stuff and tips for drawing wood grain. That was over 30 years ago now and I still hold the skills I learned in that class in high esteem.
Sadly, I haven't stayed on top of drawing much after that. I hadn't even really thought about it much until my most recent girlfriend. Her whole family were pretty great at drawing including my girlfriend who would very occasionally draw something for me. A few years back, I got some sketch books and pencils for us to draw as a nice activity for us to do. She actually was impressed by my skill for not having drawn in so many years. Unfortunately, the activity was not very regular and I also wonder if she was afraid of the degradation in her skills as she had some health issues where a medicine she was on gave her a tremor. Then a little over a year ago, she had a heart attack and fell into a coma. When she came out, she didn't have much strength in her hand to pick up a pencil. I don't think I have ever seen her draw since.
She died early last month, so I will never get to see another one of her drawings. I still have some blank sketch pads of my own and have given some serious thought to getting back into drawing. I feel like I owe her carrying on our shared hobby, even if we didn't do it that often or for that long.
You are an amazing artist ❤❤❤❤bravissima
Thank you!!
Thanks for an inspiring video! Yes, I said inspiring. 🙂❤
Thank you for all of your wonderful insight. I am learning to draw for the first time.
I would love to hear more about the sketchbook with the 100 days of exercises.
How did you know those were foundational skills in the first place?
I feel like compared to you I'm a -10 in the beginner level of drawing.
I'm not sure where to even begin at the moment. All I know is that I have a paper, I have a pen, and I don't have a lot of time, but I have a passion to learn.
❤❤
Any advice would be greatly appreciated
Hi! Glad you found my video useful.
So, if you're RIGHT at the beginning, you haven't drawn at all or not since you were at school, I think Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain by Betty Edwards is fun. Just... don't take the dodgy neuroscience as gospel truth. I bought the "workbook" variant of the book, and it was a genuine joy to go from the "before" to the "after" with the self-portrait. If you google it, you'll see really great examples of that before/after exercise online and I think mine is somewhere in this video as well. When I started, I genuinely was like, ha, that is OTHER people, not me, I'll never be able to do that, but it actually truly worked. Such a huge confidence boost and like I said, a joy to draw something successfully after very little time. I personally found it to be a very low time commitment and it's fairly inexpensive as these things go. I think I spent about 25-30 hours on the book in total over the course of about a month. It does not really try to give you too many technical drawing skills, but it will give you a chance to experience making a drawing, which is really helpful at this very early stage.
If you're a bit past that point, then as far as the foundational exercises from my 100 day sketchbook are concerned, they were taken from online courses/videos that I watched or followed. I can tell you about the ones I did, but I think it's worth acknowledging that sometimes you just can't get on with some particular teacher's style or presentation, and it's worth shopping around a bit to find someone who presents the ideas in a way that works better for you. The basics themselves are really well-known and established, so there's not actually a huge difference in WHAT is being taught up to a certain point, so what you're looking for is a WAY that it's taught that really works for you.
So, my personal favourites were:
1. Drawabox (www.drawabox.com). This whole approach to drawing comes out of fields like product design and architecture, and it feels more analytical and technical in many ways than other courses. I am quite analytical in the way I approach things, and I therefore found this course almost comforting when I was a beginner -- it managed to make what is often described in very non-analytical terms (beauty, style, feeling, imagination) more understandable. However, this ultimately wore thin for me once it got into drawing actual things (plants, animals, etc) and I never finished the course. And for other people that more technical/clinical approach never suits them at all.
However, I think the first part of Drawabox (lessons 1 and 2, which cover lines, shapes, volumes, basic perspective) is brilliant. It does feel a little technical and dry (even the course creator acknowledges that very clearly in Lesson 0) and you definitely need to pace yourself so you don't burn out on grinding the longer exercises, but it's really basic and foundational, and a LOT of the exercises in my 100 day sketchbook are drawn from foundational skills I learned from it. For me personally, as a real beginner, JUST doing the 8 pages per exercise or whatever it was that Drawabox recommended was not nearly enough, but doing a whole 200 pages in that sketchbook was transformational. Pros: It's free, or close to free, very low barriers to entry (a pen and some paper), very well-established. Cons: It can feel very grind-y, especially things like the 250 Boxes challenge. For me personally, although I did lesson 3 (plants) and most of 4 (insects) I started not to like the pedagogy or teaching style as much, and when (for unrelated reasons) I stopped drawing for a while, I never went back to it when I started again. But those first two lessons would give you loads of things to work on actively that will underpin ALL your future drawings (lines, shapes, volumes) no matter what style of art you do in future (Okay, maybe not if you go into abstracts...) For someone short on time I think it is quite useful, because it is definitely the sort of thing you could work on in bite-size chunks. I had so many random sheets of paper scattered around where I'd spend ~20 mins a day just working on some very simple exercises.
2. Brent Eviston's series of courses on Skillshare "The Art and Science of Drawing". So, if Drawabox comes out of the product design tradition, Brent Eviston comes more from the classical drawing tradition. I liked his delivery of information, which is very methodical and flows very cleanly from topic to topic. He covers some familiar ground from Drawabox (lines, volumes), but some other new things (shading, measuring) and also he approaches it in a different way, with a slightly different type of explanation and a different medium (pencil rather than fineliner in DAB) which I found helpful. I finished the course and even re-did a couple of sections. I also like his basic figure drawing course (Art and science of Figure Drawing) but I'd recommend you do the more foundational course before that even if you only ever want to draw people. The courses are fairly bite-size, and you could definitely spend ~15-20 mins watching a short video in the course, and then fitting in another 15-30mins here and there working on it over the course of a week.
I will say this type of more classic artist training course is *extremely* common -- you can certainly find a similar sort of course taught in a broadly similar way on many other major online platforms. Some examples: Proko.com, specifically Stan Prokopenko's basics course. It is $$ for the "premium version" but there's a LOT of free content on his site, and it is VERY bite-sized and easy to digest. Personally, I find his delivery overall quite irritating for no really rational reason, so I've never followed a whole course of his, but it's definitely well-designed and a lot of people LOVE his teaching delivery, so it's worth a look. Plus there are online art schools like NMA ($$), Watts' Atelier ($$$) , CGMA ($$$$) etc.
Personally, I picked the Skillshare class because of the ubiquitous TH-camr "one month free" Skillshare offers meant a low cost of entry, and I think it's worth investigating the free month just to try the course out -- you can always cancel before you have to pay anything. I tried some similar NMA classes at one point, but there's a bigger upfront cost, and again, I didn't love the way some of those fundamentals classes were taught. (I bet I sound super fussy about watching some videos, but I think because I am in education myself and often professionally required to sit through people delivering information badly, I have very low tolerance for doing more of it in my free time!)
There are also LOADS of books on this topic if you're more of a book learner. A book I liked along these lines was: "Drawing For the Absolute and Utter Beginner" by C Watson Garcia. Again, this covers pretty much exactly the same ground. You might also want to look into in person "Intro to Drawing" classes in local colleges (or whatever equivalent where you live) -- there are several offered near me for quite a small fee, but I was learning in 2020 so it wasn't an option. Although it sounds like a huge time commitment if you're already time poor, an American friend of mine who is insanely busy did one at a local community college and she found it was great -- just scheduling the time and setting up things like it was her husband's responsibility to feed the kids that night meant she felt like she had to go do it. She ended up going to I think all but one class in the whole semester as a result. So, you know, worth thinking about if you enjoy the in-person classroom experience and would enjoy meeting other beginner artists.
If you look at everything I've suggested and you're like, nope, no, nope, then a quick search will turn up a dozen more options to consider. You are looking for something that covers: lines (sometimes called "mark-making"), shapes, volumes, cross-contours and shading (or "light" or something similar) and probably measuring or something similar.
I would say overall, there are two cautionary notes I'd offer you:
1. Try not to make the technical drills the main or the only thing you do, because while they are really useful and will build skills, and they are super easy to do when you only have a short time to practice, they probably aren't REALLY what you want to spend all your time drawing and you WILL burn out and get bored. I am not saying this like I avoided this mistake, because although I did things like my books of trees and houses I honestly did not do as much of that kind of drawing as I probably should have early on. It's just something to have in your mind.
2. Patience and practice is hard and often feels extremely unrewarding, but it WILL pay off. There are things I can do now with a piece of paper and a pencil that I could NEVER have imagined I would EVER do back when I was struggling through DAB Lesson 1, trying to draw straight-ish lines. Think about your assumption that you started your comment with -- I must have had a head start on you, somehow. I really didn't. REALLY. No "talent", no skills from a hobby that has something in common with drawing, nothing. So truly, anything I have done is purely down to practice, time, and effort, all of it after I turned 40, and thus it is also within your reach.
Wow, that was an essay! Anyway, I hope you found something in it useful and I hope you really enjoy drawing once you get started!
Thank you so much for this! It’s one of the most helpful videos for an absolute beginner that I’ve seen. 😊
This video is great, I'm a complete beginner and have been getting frustrated just drawing random stuff and not looking how I see it in my head, I think shapes and volumes best place to start
Glad it was helpful!
Thank you, I am also this type of genuine beginner, well... advanced beginner so to say at this point. It was really refreshing to see someone who is not an architect/designer/or any other “art” related field person to be starting out later in their life like I do ❤ and REALLY starting from zero, as I do ❤
Glad you enjoyed it. I agree -- I have nothing against people coming to drawing from a creative background, but it was always hard to see myself in their experiences/videos.
I'm just starting to draw in my fourties and I am a total beginner. Thank you for this video.
You're very welcome!
i though it is better to start drawing object in your home or tree you see but from life? love your idea
Thank you for sharing.
My pleasure!
Thanks for showing us this book💕 what e development! Maybe you could make a book for beginners? I have never seen such a book. Either it ist for faces, Figures, trees, houses, landscapes or anything else. But you put all together to learn a little bit from everything and the eyrything came together. I adore your discipline and happiness and your effort. Thanks again, for showing ist.
One question: have you ever used an eraser or did you chance your mind if there was a „wrong“ stroke, which you would not like in that picture, which what not fit it that picture? Did you think „ um, what could that now become?“ or „how can I change it it to feel it right again for me?“
Thanks again for your explanation of your way of development development🙏👏👏👏👏💕
Great advice and fire sketchbook, thumbs up.
Thx for this inspiring video. Even your first drawings, with the Mark Kistler book, looked very good and clean. Not at al like a beginner as me hehe. I started drawing in my teens, just copying anime. Gave up quickly and picked it up a few times over the many years, but only in times my normal routine of life changed, like you said. During covidtimes, being 35y old then, i started with the draw a box lessons. Drew a page or 2 during my lunchbreak at work or so. The organic forms were fun, but i still gave up. I have many empty sketchbooks i don't want to mess up hehe. My main interest is trees, realistic or not, any sort... Seeing your tree sketchbook was the most versatile i've seen and i LOVE it! They all look so good and not at all as 'beginner sketches'. The last book you showed is what my first attempt to start learning looks like too, but i never hang in there. Even though i at least think of drawing once or twice a day!! I just never take the time to do even 1 little drawing, cause '' it will look like crap anyway ''. That's the worst attitude and will not get me anywhere, i know. But you got me motivated again 🙏🧡 thx!!
What are those draw a box lessons?
I think I mentioned in the video that I tried drawing on and off for 4 years before I finally knuckled down and started drawing consistently, so I definitely sympathise! It's really hard to keep going when you're discouraged by your results all the time.
I really recommend the John Muir Laws tree drawing video as a starting point if you're keen to draw them: johnmuirlaws.com/draw-trees-video-workshop/
@@charlottebrown1975 ok super thx. I'll check it out 👍.
While the "pretty" sketchbook tours are very lovely to look at, they were really damaging to my thought processes surrounding sketchbooks. I have to keep reminding myself my sketchbook is a space for me to learn, experiment, and try new things. A record of my progress!
I tried DrawABox towards the end of 2021, and failed spectacularly when I started rotating boxes. I really struggle to wrap my brain around 3D shapes. I also don't "get" gesture drawing yet. It's a struggle trying to find that resource or exercise that makes things "click" for me as it were.
This is such a gorgeous sketchbook
Thanks for sharing, your dedication has surely payed off.
Thanks for watching!
Adult beginner artists without any art background!! Your video really resonated with me as I am on a very similar journey, including feeling the need to share it online. I don’t seem to do as much technical practice :) I like to get messy with it :) You can definitely tell how that practice has paid off for you. Thank you for sharing your sketchbooks and your thoughts!
Thanks! Hope you continue to enjoy your own style of art practice!
Great video and really wonderful for me, where I’m at, as a novice.
Thanks so much.
Glad it was helpful!
Robot is so cute! :D
You’re a beginner? Wow! I thoroughly enjoyed your video. I, that’s me (not sure what others think), didn’t think I was a beginner, but now I’m not so sure. I have drawn since childhood and at school I could finish to of my class in the Art lesson and I could sometimes drop down a division, so like you, it didn’t matter about art when I left school. I only took it up again when I saw someone’s drawing (painting?) on Flickr of a cat done in pastel pencil and now I use those most of the time. Not really been into sketchbooks, but my daughter bought me a “Sketch a Day” A5 size book and I now work with that (not necessarily every day though). I really liked your video which has provoked me into doing a little more with a sketchbook. I only came across this video when the thumbnail popped up on my screen. I have now subscribed.
Thanks, glad you enjoyed the video!
What did you do to practice drawing 3D shapes??
Initially, the exercises in the DrawABox programme (drawabox.com/). Then after that, just lots (and lots) of practice.
I loved your idea on trees and rocks, I'm curious the angular or modern tree styles that you drew what is that called and where did you get the idea for the shapes?
I think it's based on something I saw on Pinterest.
Fantastic Video!, the trees and robot book composition look great!!
Q: in the 150 day junk book, did you use an eraser a lot or just keep sketching the shapes? (signed...56yr old beginner)
In the junk sketchbook, after the first couple of pages I didn't use an eraser at all, I just kept moving across the page. It did take me those first couple of days to settle into the no-erasing mindset, but once I did I don't think I ever used an eraser again.
In general, I think when you decide whether to erase or not you should ask yourself whether it matters if this *specific* drawing is correct.
So, if I was filling a practice page full of cylinders in a junk sketchbook, erasing was a waste of time because it really didn't matter if any specific cylinder was bad, or even, at the start, if the whole page of cylinders turned out bad. My goal in that sketchbook was not to produce pages full of well-drawn cylinders, it was to learn and practice the techniques of cylinder drawing -- drawing the ellipse, making it look like it is in perspective, etc -- so that in the future, I could draw a cylinder in any position and any perspective right first time with no erasing or corrections.
In this mindset a cylinder with a big mistake is just a data point ("this cylinder looks wonky because the ellipse is too flat") that I used to improve how I drew the next cylinder ("I'm going to draw the same cylinder, but draw the ellipse differently"). My focus was not on correcting a mistake I had already made, but trying not to make it again, and then later, my focus was not on being pleased with a good cylinder, but making sure that I knew what made it more successful that previous attempts, and also that I could keep drawing it successfully any time I wanted.
In the end, of course, with enough practice I did end up with pages of well-drawn cylinders, but it's not because I spent hours on one page, carefully drawing, erasing and correcting each line and ellipse on each cylinder. It's because I drew pages and pages and PAGES of bad cylinders and then better cylinders and then good cylinders, until drawing a good page of cylinders is just something I can do now, without much effort.
On the other hand, if I was working on the early stages of what I hoped would be a finished pen and ink drawing of a tree, and I was drawing a cylinder as an underdrawing of the trunk and it went a bit wonky, I would erase and correct my drawing. Getting that drawing right MATTERS: I know that no matter how well my subsequent details on the tree turn out, it's never going to look right if my underlying cylinder is bad. At some point my practice pages of cylinders started to pay off because as I improved at the basic skills, I made fewer mistakes and spent less time correcting my underdrawings, and could spend more time on the parts of the drawing that are more fun.
Sorry, that reply got long! Hope it helps!
I have dedicated this year to improve my figure drawing, wow it's frustrating
This is extremely inspiring!! 😍Could you make a video to show the different material you're using ? ☺️
Thank you! There are some notes in the description box about some of my materials, but honestly I use mostly very common, inexpensive tools. I'll maybe do a specific art supplies video however in the near future, thank you for the idea!
Just found your channel, subscribed. You have a lot of talent and I hope you keep up with art! 😊🇺🇸
Thank you so much!
I am looking at doing a fundamental sketchbook of my own where did you find the information from.
Was it youtube or books?
I use to have skills but put of drawing for some reason so now I want to put in the time to redevelop the basics
Honestly, I had no single source. A lot of my fundamentals practice came from the early phases of Draw A Box (drawabox.com), and then also from various beginner/fundamentals courses and books -- I went into these in a bit more detail in my "Drawing Starting Point" video. You can't really go wrong though with focussing at least a bit on line quality, basic shapes and basic volumes as a starting point. My experience was that as I worked on other topics in other sketchbooks, I'd run across small basic skills that I needed more practice on, and I'd just incorporate that into my practice sketchbook.
Thank you so much for sharing. I found this very interesting. I have also just subscribed, I look forward to following along on your art journey.
Thanks and welcome!
There is a quote I always remember that says, “ You have to draw a lot of ugly stuff, before you draw anything good “.
Yes! The Walt Stanchfield thing! "We all have 10,000 bad drawings in us. The sooner we get them out the better." I love that too, though I admit I am always concerned that maybe there won't be anything good even when I'm 10,001 drawings in 😆
lots of things resonated with me here! I also did the DAB, I enjoyed it too. Not knowing what to draw and that it's never too late to learn what you want, i've also started sharing my journey online too! I love your sketches, actually I feel they are really good for someone who has started totally from scratch. I'm curious, how many years was this done over? I look forward to seeing more of your videos!
Thanks! It's a bit complicated to say how much time I put into those particular sketchbooks. The video is mostly chronological, although a few of my sketchbooks overlapped. From the point where I started work on DAB until the end of the video is about 16 months by the calendar, but I did not do any art practice at all for 6 of those months. Before that, I did a few weeks at a time here and there over a period of 4 years -- probably a total of 8-10 weeks, but very very spread out. So depending on your point of view, it either took 6 years or about 12 months.
@@charlottebrown1975 its so great to see other learners sharing their work. I have also started to share my art progress and beginnings on youtube too. Its so great to be on a platform where there are other learners sharing their work. I feel like we are growing together!
Wow Mark Kistler taught me how to draw to. He had a show on public access in the early 90s. Nice
He has online classes now! He definitely has a website and a YT channel, and also he has a whole class based on that 30 Day book on 21draw. :D
❤❤❤❤
I think your sketchbooks and the large one with all the repetitive sketches are fantastic. It makes me sad that you kept saying that they weren’t. Perhaps stand back and look again and you’ll finally see for yourself.
Soul sister
My art teacher always told us to draw things from our environment, things we knew well because we saw them often and were easy to reach/find and spend time studying them. He really made us see how interesting can be to draw small ordinary items. He also told us to keep making these sketches even if we didn't plan to paint anything important. Just a few minutes every day, or one or two items every day. It became a habit for me to think what would be next item once I finished the previous one. It made practice fun.
That sounds like fun! I often find myself looking at the ornaments in my house and asking myself how I would draw them.
Wish I’d seen this video first before all the candy coated basic drawing videos.
This is really great stuff :) I hope you continue to draw and I also think you would really like figure drawing check it out :D
Thank you! I actually did start learning to draw the figure in mid-2021 -- it didn't get a mention here because I was only just starting out and my figure drawings never made it into these sketchbooks 😁
Unbelievable.
I really do not understand, what do people mean, when they say:" i want to learn to draw" ???
I’m still very new to drawing and have followed people advise to do drawabox but I feel it doesn’t apply to what I’m drawing because I’m not drawing buildings or boxes. What I don’t see much videos is about form construction and form deconstruction. I think this is the most important. If you can do forms you are half way there. But I still have not found any in depth videos about forms construction, what to practice, how to practice a study, how to then make your own drawings from imagination
never thought of buying book for drawing.. i'm very new, 30yr old adult and i draw like a 13 yr old i only copy some drawings on google images🫠🫠 there was no encouragement on any hobbies whatsoever when i was a kid. i only began experimenting on hobbies like this lately😢 i should learn with a book from now on.. thats what lacking of me..
Good luck!