How to Draw 101: Basic Drawing Skills & Sketching Exercises

This is the first episode of my How to Draw Series. This course is about Basic Drawing Skills and Sketching.

If you are an absolute beginner at drawing, this one can be a perfect choice for your very first drawing course. Or if you are not a beginner, but you are having difficulties with your drawings, you are just probably missing some of the basic puzzles which can be easily fixed in these lessons.

This course requires no previous drawing knowledge or special drawing equipment.
We’ll be drawing with simple traditional graphite pencil on ordinary paper.

The first section is kind of an introduction to drawing.
I will show you

• the drawing tools you need
• optional tools for the future
• how to hold the pencil to get a better drawing experience
• how to see the world with the eyes of the artist

In the second section we will go through the basic building blocks of drawing. We will develop your basic drawing skills making a lot of fundamental drawing exercises.

You will learn how to draw

• straight lines
• parallel lines
• simple 2D shapes like triangles, rectangles, and squares
• curves
• circles, ovoid shapes, and ellipses
• simple 3D objects like cubes and cylinders

We will also develop your hand coordination by connecting dots with straight and curved lines.

The goal of these lessons is to gain confidence at drawing these simple elements that we will use to build more complex objects.

I will give you an introduction to perspective drawing discussing the most frequently used 2-point and 3-point perspective. I will also explain an important drawing principle called foreshortening. With this knowledge you’ll be able to draw subjects convincingly in the 3D space.

In the third section we’ll put the drawing skills you’ve learned into practice. We will make all sorts of sketches on real life subjects based on reference photos. We will draw

• a chess pawn built from simple 2D shapes
• a chair by drawing straight lines using the rules of perspective
• a fish using a bunch of S-curves
• a profile portrait to practice proportions
• a chess pawn with simple shading
• a pair of glasses
• a dancing human figure for an introduction to gesture drawing
• and an astronaut just for fun

At the end of the course you can check if your drawing skills have improved. I’m sure they will if you make all the exercises with me.

I hope you will enjoy this course as much as I did through its creation.

See you in my Basic Drawing Skills & Sketching course!