How to teach yourself to draw

Sun, 31 Mar 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Recently I’ve been teaching myself to sketch with a pen in my notebook. It’s been a fun and rewarding experience, so I thought I’d share the rough steps of what I’ve been doing to get a little better at drawing. Follow along, and I hope you have some fun!

Start doodling in a nearby sketch book. Small designs, stick figures, anything really.
- Start looking up tutorials on drawing fun but simple things. These give you some nice momentum, and feel great!
- Try to learn how to draw faces better. Give up quickly because it’s hard (especially lips for some reason).
- Start learning perspective for the first time. This is much easier and you know you’re doing it right.
Find out that fineliner sketching is a whole thing and looks super cool.
Stumble upon YouTube videos of Kim Jung Gi drawing.
- Become awestruck.
- He’s seems so nice, and he draws with a fluency that looks effortless.
- Start looking at his bigger pieces. Some combine like 6 different perspective types in one page, and you can feel the story in the different sections, even though it’s just one large picture. He seems so cool.
- Watch tons of videos of him drawing, and talking, and explaining his process.
Learn that he died.
- Learn that he died in 2022.
- Learn that he was 47.
Get sad/Stop drawing.
- Feel like you missed the boat on meeting another cool person.
- Imagine all the cool and interesting people you will never be able to meet.
- Realize that list will only grow over time.
- Wonder to yourself how you’re supposed to move through the world to meet the most cool people.
- Think to yourself This guy just seemed like a normal dude. Would I have even known how cool he was if I'd just met him at a coffee shop?
- Continue this thread in your head: In fact, that’s a big part of what makes him so cool; He’s not some bizarre outlier living in the mountains, he’s just a down to earth guy. I might be meeting people like him all the time and never know it.
- Realize that you can’t be sure, no matter what you do, that you’re meeting all the cool people in your neighboorhood, let alone in the entire world.
- Begin to worry that, even if you could find all the cool people around you, would they think you’re cool too?
- Worry to yourself: Would they even want to talk to me? I'm not as good at anything as they are at the things they do. What would we even do?
Begin having some light existential panic, and wonder if you have still have time to become a cool person?
- Worry about if you’re fundamentally capable of anything cool, even with infinite time.
- Feel embarrassed about this thought
- Try to imagine how you would feel if you got to where Gi, or any of the other cool people ended up.
- Wonder if there even is a feeling that’s associated with that level of accomplishment, or if they feel like you do now (horrifying).
- Wonder if, from the beginning, these people have felt the way they do right now about whatever their chosen activity is, and that for them, it’s more about the activity being fun than it being meaningful?
- Let it occur to you that you may be overly burdened with words like genius, greatness, and passion.
- Realize that true greatness is probably accomplished through people doing things they enjoy or are already compelled to do.
- Realize that in order to achieve greatness, you might have to abandon your desire for greatness.

[!WARNING]

Art on Sad Frog Blog

How to teach yourself to draw