A couple of years ago I noticed I couldn’t draw some things that I wanted. In that time, I used to draw #dtiys (draw this in your style) that I found on instagram created by my favorite Illustrators but when it come to make my own illustrations from scratch I was totally unable. The discomfort that I felt by this made me feel frustrated and incapable of drawing anymore so I decided to delete my Instagram account and stop making illustrations.
After searching and searching for months I found a couple of videos that explained Why drawing is so difficult? and finally understood that behind every Illustrator there are two things: years of practice and the most important, their ability to apply the fundamentals of art combined with their own style to be capable of recreating what they want to represent because for different levels of drawing or styles you require different levels of knowledge of these fundamentals. in next posts I’ll go deeper explaining this so subscribe to my newsletter 😋.
Like in other fields there are people who had studied Art for centuries and found certain techniques and/or theories that help to create more profesional art or simply art that really connects with you, these theories are called Art Fundamentals.
I don’t know if you knew this but I didn’t 🤯. I could finally see a clearer path to follow to improve my art and understood that the problem wasn’t how talented I was or how much I practiced but my lack of knowledge of these fundamentals.
I started buying and borrowing books from the library to understand these fundamentals and found a couple that I continue using until this day (note to myself 💭 share the books I’m studying). I also started 3 courses:
- “Improving Your Drawing Skills” in LinkedIn Learning
- Domina el color by Paper Monsters (this course is in Spanish)
- And the most important to me Drawabox
The reasons why I recommend Drawabox for an starting artist and why I enrolled are the following:
- Formalize my education as a self-taught artist through a well structured and rigorous course.
- The option to complete all the course for free or through credits to get professional feedback.
- Their real approach (the 50% rule) to each topic through a combination of theory (videos and reading material), practice which includes a community in their Website, Discord or Reddit that share from homework to their own journeys.
- Uncomfortable (founder of Drawabox) profound commitment to share what he believed was the key to develop the best drawing skills through a course that is constantly improving, when it started it was a just a subreddit.
As you can see there are different ways to start your path towards improving you drawing skills, remember to pick the one that makes you feel the most comfortable and remember to be kind to yourself when learning.
Hope this was helpful, let me know if you have any questions 😊.
Paola
couragepassion 