The 4 Biggest Mistakes When Learning How to Draw

Jun 13

Written By Nate Flamm

Sketchifer

Salutations!

Alright. So imagine it’s the 🎸 future ✨

You’ve devoted the past 5 years to learning how to draw. You worked REALLY hard.

Turns out you focused on all the wrong stuff. You didn’t improve at all, and your skills are exactly where you’re at now. Whomp whomp. The future is lame ~💔

But time machine back with me for a minute - nobody wants to spin their wheels; lose valuable time and effort.

What you need Marty, is a roadmap 🚗

The 4 Biggest Mistakes When Learning How to Draw

1. Setting The Bar Too High

If I have any advice for your first Tennis competition it is: don’t face off against Serena Williams.

You’ll get obliterated. You’ll be frustrated, disillusioned, and worse yet - you’ll have learned nothing.

So too it is with art. Your favorite anime character in a dynamic pose, a hyper realistic portrait… it’s no wonder why you might feel stuck.

The solution: start small. Instead of a full portrait, maybe just draw an eye. Or, try drawing a sphere (the shape of an eye). Still hard? Heck, let’s just work on circles a bit.

Then, work your way up 💪

2. Focusing On The Wrong Concepts

Often the things that are intuitively interesting are not the healthiest for our growth. I love eating chocolate cake, but that doesn’t make it better for me 🤔

Consider this to be a balanced drawing food pyramid (but accurate):

Observation - Draw from life
Analytics - Learn “rules of thumb,” or technical guidelines
Master Studies - Draw other people’s drawings (yes, includes cool anime characters)
Imagination - The fun part. Draw from memory, and invent your own stuff

3. Not Having The Right Mindset

This is a Transcript in and of itself (and will be), but there are two main culprits here.

😓 Perfectionism

The solution: Draw more. Every drawing you do is 1/x. Where x = the number of drawings you’ve ever done in your life. When x increases, the ratio shifts.

Once you’ve done like 10,000 drawings, a singular drawing by itself feels a whole lot less precious.

😫 Frustration

The solution: You are not your art - you have value, even before you put pencil to page. Also, stop comparing yourself to other artists who’ve been drawing way longer than you, and start measuring against yourself. Periodically looking back at a sketch you did even just a couple months ago, and the gains you’ve made since can be quite enlightening.

4. Not Drawing Enough

Quantity is more important than quality. Read that again.

Learning to ride a bike isn’t about doing a ton of research beforehand, and being perfect on your first attempt. Just get on the friggin’ bike, and pedal. 100 attempts is better than 10 attempts - failure and success aside.

Think less, DRAW MORE 🫡

The 4 Biggest Mistakes When Learning How to Draw