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Having trouble coming up with something to draw? No worries - while you'll eventually learn how to start from a tiny seed of a thought and gradually nurture it into a complex concept to explore through design and illustration, it's perfectly fine not to be there just yet.
For now though, here's an idea that might interest you.
Reboot Reboot
It was 1994. Many of you were not yet born, or yet capable of coherent conversations. But for those of you who had achieved object permanence and could sit upright on your own for the 23 minute runtime of an episode, the TV show "Reboot" was an absolute marvel. The very first feature-length TV show to be made entirely using the nascent technology of 3D computer graphics.
Sure, it doesn't look like much more than a C+ college final project by today's standards, but scratching at the surface - and if you're lucky enough to flip through the art books for it - it still holds up, and can teach us a great deal about design. All over the world of Reboot, you'll see computer and technological concepts translated into characters, environments, props, narrative circumstances, and more. Some of the relationships to their concepts/names seem silly and irrelevant, but hide a much subtler relationship - like Hexadecimal, one of the frequent antagonists, whose personality and faces swap at the wave of a hand, similarly to how the digits of a hexadecimal number can be used as "switches" to represent data.
But I digress! Here's your challenge: take an abstract concept related to computers, the internet, or technology in general and design something - be it a character, a prop, a vehicle, an environment, or whatever else - to represent it. If you're familiar with Reboot, then try to design it to fit into its world, although this is not by any means required as I imagine many of you haven't yet had the pleasure of that particular bit of 90s nostalgia.
To get started, try looking at glossaries of tech terms like this one, or these.
This one isn't doing it for you? How about this one instead: Consecrated Critters >>>
The recommendation below is an advertisement. Most of the links here are part of Amazon's affiliate program (unless otherwise stated), which helps support this website. It's also more than that - it's a hand-picked recommendation of something we've used ourselves, or know to be of impeccable quality. If you're interested, here is a full list.
Steven Zapata's Secrets of Shading
Some of you will have noticed that Drawabox doesn't teach shading at all. Rather, we focus on the understanding of the spatial relationships between the form we're drawing, which feeds into how one might go about applying shading. When it comes time to learn about shading though, you're going to want to learn it from Steven Zapata, hands down.
Take a look at his portfolio, and you'll immediately see why.