As the title says what do i draw when i still can't draw anything that even remotely resembles what i'm trying to draw. Should i be doing something such as How to Draw by Scott Robertson so i can approach a point were i can actually draw what i'm trying to depict. Any help or advice is appreciated.
Try this:
Get something you want to draw
Stare at the thing you are trying to draw continuously
Draw it on the paper without looking
The reason you can't draw something that resembles what you are trying to draw is not (only) because of lack of drawing skill. It's because you cant even see it properly. You cannot see the right proportions. You cannot see the curves and how the play against each other. You cannot see the detail. And so on.
Sure, sure, you can "see" things. You can read this text. And you can go along your day to day life without stumbling into everything. And your brain is very good at achieving all those tasks with minimal information.
But by drawing without looking you get a clear depiction of just how minimal information your brain gets by. The good news is that by doing this for a couple of hours every day for a month or so you'll have much more improved perception skills.
You will still not be able to draw all that well, but you will at least be able to get a tiny bit closer to drawing what you see. You'll be able to see things your brain would've completely skipped over. It will probably also increase your enjoyment of the subject matter you practice with.
If you spend a month drawing flowers like this, you may develop a fine taste for the various shapes of the petals. Or if you draw lions for a month, you begin to really notice the bulk of their musculature and the angularity of their faces. And so on.
This also tells you what you should draw: Draw those things you find the most enjoyable to see. Drawing them repeatedly will only further increase your enjoyment of those things.
Finally, this is not technical skill. This is like doing running or lifting weights. Sure there are some basics to learn, but the majority of your time/effort will be spend on training your body to run faster/lift heavier weights. Same with drawing, you gotta train your brain to be able to further digest and extract as much information as possible from what you see (and not discard that information).
As an addition to this fantastic suggestion, the exercise is called "Blind Contour" and if you do it properly then it will teach your brain to draw what your eye is actually seeing.
Another way to accomplish this drawing what you see type exercise is to take a photo and flip it upside down, and draw THAT, keeping the proportions as close to each other as possible. This one can be difficult, but flipping the photo can take away some of our recognition of the subject, making it easier to draw what we are literally seeing.
I include an example below that I drew up a few years ago now. The photo on the left is the reference. The drawing in the middle was created by sketching over the photo as a shortcut (different from what's been discussed, mostly used to demonstrate what you're aiming for). The drawing on the right was just taking the basic forms and drawing symbolically. Drawing symbolically is a shortcut that our brains take that most artists need to break, since it gets in the way of drawing what you see.
An Example of the Difference Between Drawing What You See and Symbolic Drawing
The shrimp method https://www.deviantart.com/5019/art/Tutorial-How-to-draw-anything-352414195 is another way of accomplishing this training, though it has a slightly different "route" than either me or Yoyo have suggested here! Worth checking out to see what works best for you
Definitely something that needs to be trained, definitely something worth the time to figure out.
Added some more info in a reply to Yoyoblue so be sure to check that out (definitely agree with their advice!)
Other things that you can attempt while trying to draw for the sake of drawing:
Draw things poorly on purpose! If you're trying to make something that looks bad, then it's a success when you make something that looks bad!
Draw things to the best of your ability, and learn to accept that your best might not be amazing. It's still your best and you should be proud of yourself for trying.
Challenge yourself in general! It's really easy to think "oh I can't draw that right now so I'm not going to try" but when you let that poison your artistic inspiration then you'll find it hard to draw anything outside of a very small comfort zone. I always say the first step to getting better is being willing to suck, and that sucking tends to become a more obvious prerequisite when you get to more difficult subjects. We have to make peace with that, or else we'll never get anywhere
Best of luck on your journey, and I hope you push yourself to new great heights!
Draw ugly things Find things you like to draw or simple images or just lines. Then draw them. Badly. Very badly.
There is no such thing as "you can't draw." There is only "you cannot move your hand the way you want."
To learn that movement, like anything else, requires practice. Lots of directed, purposeful and time-spaced practice lies behind all the 'cool stuff on X or Y site.' This is not mindless drilling. This is not thousands of boxes without pause.
Practice trying to move your hand in the correct way: draw from the shoulder, look at images as built from peices and try drawing those peices. Ghost your lines: that is practice a line physically and mentally before drawing it. Warm-ups can help.
Only time will re-wire your body to the point it will respond to the command 'draw this.' The time is shorter for some and longer for others. Much much longer. You will forget things. You will do worse some days.
The images you want to make will never look like the images you do make. This is the failure. We all have to accept our failure. We move on from each failure by learning things from them. If you don't fail you don't learn. If you aren't failing your not challening yourself enough to learn. You don't climb a wall by sitting on a couch.
If you read the review on the site, Roberton's book is one of the inspirations for Draw a Box. A lot of the early material in the book is similar to the content you will experience in the lessons. Like most drawing instruction books the information and instruction is very light. Unlike a full course, much has to be left out of any real physical book.
Several other people have published similar books since /r/artfundamentals and drawabox.com have existed. Many of those incorporate techniques found here. And as with How to Draw they are by necesity abbreviated. A full course of basics like Draw-a-box can fill in the missing peices to let you leverage these books to their fullest. But they may not help as much in the opposite direction.
What the book don't and can't add is useful feedback. So draw something. Then show it to someone who can critique it. Take those elements of a critique you don't understand and ask questions. Take those you do see and work on chaning how you do them.
The fact it is an UGLY drawing does not matter. If you learn from it, next drawing can and will be less ugly. For a learning course, this is the only thing that matters.
Honestly? Whatever you want. You have to push past the expectations that what you make will be a masterpiece.
Say you want to draw swords, draw a sword. After you have done that, look at the sword and decide what you like or do not like about it, then draw another sword.
Same thing with characters, draw them. Sure their anatomy will be off and they make look crazy but you are getting practice. You are actively practicing drawing figures and probably having a lot more fun than drawing boxes.
Like the Staedtlers, these also come in a set of multiple weights - the ones we use are F. One useful thing in these sets however (if you can't find the pens individually) is that some of the sets come with a brush pen (the B size). These can be helpful in filling out big black areas.
Still, I'd recommend buying these in person if you can, at a proper art supply store. They'll generally let you buy them individually, and also test them out beforehand to weed out any duds.
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