When I was a kid I thought that drawing requires talent. I haven’t been aware that it’s just a skill. So in 2019 I was 28 years old and this information made me feel like I ‘ve wasted DECADES of my life by not drawing. I was angry at myself for making such a big mistake.
When I eventually became brave enough to try my hand at drawing my perfectionism didn’t make it any easier. But I made a strong decision that I won’t give up!
For the last year I’ve been practising my drawing skills almost every day. Today I’d like to show you most of my pencil drawings. I hope that my struggle could inspire you to try your hand at this too 🙂
Ta-dah! I think this might be one of my earliest pencil drawings. I’ve drawn this sketch using only one random pencil. I wasn’t aware how important for quality of the drawings are good quality art supplies such as: professional pencils, blending stumps, erasers in different shapes etc.
I didin’t know how to shade or blend my drawings properly at that time.
At first I’ve been trying to learn how to draw by observing and imitating the artworks of artists I admire.
At the later time it turned out that in my case video tutorials worked a lot better and faster for improving my drawing skills.
Maybe I should leave it without comment. Or never show this to anyone EVER. But you know what? During my art journey I found out that the fear of creating something ugly can make you feel blocked. But the truth is that:
The expert in anything was once a beginner.
Bad artworks you’re not proud of are part of a learning process. You have to be aware of that. Please, let’s just keep going. Your drawings will look better eventually, I promise.
This month I discovered a fenomenal artist Silvie Mahdal and her youtube channel with useful drawing tips and tutorials. If you don’t know her and her creations I highly recommend to check out her content. Below I enclose my attempt to mimc her drawing of Daenerys.
At that time I’ve also made some drawings based on Farjana’s Drawing Academy tutorials. These are pretty easy and good for the start. If I could go back and change something in my process of learning I would begin with these drawings:
As you can see I was constantly struggling mostly with the hair look and sense of proportion.
There has been a breakthrough in August. I’ve noticed that my artworks started to improve from drawing to drawing. Therefore I’ve felt a surge of motivation and energy to create more sketches. I was enthusiastic about getting better and practicing a lot.
At the end of this month I decided to improve my hair drawing skills.
I found a step by step tutorial from another amazing artist Emmy Kalia. It’s almost TWO HOURS long. I had to be really patient and persistent to finish this drawing tutorial. It took me over 20 hours to draw this.
If you want to take part in this hair drawing challenge, here is a link to the tutorial.
Then I found out about another great artist Chris Lethal. He is really good at drawing animals.
In October I’ve bought my dream iPad Pro, so at that time I was focused mostly on exploring the secrets of digital drawing techniques.
I’m really proud of this one. I think it’s A LOT better compared to my first eye drawing from May.
At the begining of the year I decided to put my drawing skills to the test. I’ve tried to draw something from photo reference instead of using the video tutorial.
I was disappointed by the result at that time. Now I think that this drawing is not that bad at all.
I feel that this is just the beginning of my art journey. I love pencil art and I’m so excited about what future will bring. Hopefully in next year I’ll show you a lot of beautiful artwork and sketches from my sketchbooks 🙂
I hope that you found this post useful and my example shows that anybody can learn how to draw. Remember:
Practice is everything.
What do you think? 🙂
Love, M.
[…] couldn’t be an artist. Ever. And here I am, a couple of years later able to draw pretty well (click here to see my one-year drawing progress) and trying my hand in digital […]