How to draw anything – learn sketching for beginners

 In this post I want to give you a simple guide on how you can learn to draw anything. You don’t need any special skills or talent for drawing and sketching when you start, it just takes a bit of practice and the desire to learn. For an extended free PDF guide on how to draw anything scroll to the bottom of this post (existing newsletter readers please check the email I sent)!

My approach to learning how to draw is that even if you have no idea how to do this, you can get really decent after a while if you learn the basic concepts techniques and if you practice regularly. So let’s take a look at these steps.

Here’s a video version of this post:

How to draw anything | learn sketching for beginners in 7 steps (Youtube)

1 Warm up + practice hand-eye coordination

It‘s always a good idea to get warmed up a bit and get comfortable with your tools, and a warm up is also a great way to loosen your drawing muscles and bring your thoughts to the page. By playing with different mark-making techniques, you‘ll see what you can do with your pen.

So grab your pencil or pen and make different marks. Line work can be incredibly varied. Make scribbles, doodle around, create dots, stipples, hatching, zig zag lines – explore the range of your drawing tool. Also try varying pressure. Have fun with this – it‘s important to keep your practice enjoyable and playful, otherwise you will stop.

pencil scribbles and marks

To take this exploration a step further, let‘s train your hand-eye coordination a bit. Take your pencil and practice drawing a few straight and curved lines, long ones and short ones. Don’t worry about doing this right or wrong, it’s just a warm up.

Then draw a few round shapes like circles and ellipses, and try out loose shapes like lying eights. Vary the size and also vary the pressure of your pen. See what changes if you draw with your entire arm, that means locking the elbow and wrist and making motions from the shoulder joint. What will give you the smoothest arks?

Fill a page with these explorations. Keep it fun and playful. If you feel bored, you don’t need to continue. But try to notice how your hand feels now, are you more comfortable with the pencil?

I find it helpful to do just a few of these warm ups at the start of a drawing session, it helps me to create smoother line work. And for beginning sketchers it can be helpful to loosen up and learn pencil control.

warm up practice for drawing

2 Start with basic shapes + light lines

After our warm up, let’s start properly with drawing. Let‘s look at what is the basis for all drawing skills. Essentially, you can break down everything you want to draw into basic shapes. Basic shapes are circles (we already practiced those), rectangles and triangles. If you can draw these basic shapes, and I’m pretty sure you can do this, you can essentially draw anything.

basic geometrical shapes for drawing

So how does this work? When you look at an object in real life, all you need to do is figure out how you can break it down visually into easier to manage basic shapes, and put those down on paper. So you might look at a rose, or a house or a bird, and figure out how to reduce them to basic shapes. It’s much easier to draw a circle with a line attached, and refine that, than to attempt to understand a complex flower in a split second.

loose basic shapes of a round flower

So you can use those basic shapes as a loose underdrawing. For this, we‘ll start with very light linework and rough shapes, that we can refine to a more specific structure and more defined shapes in a second step. But right now, it‘s all about getting the proportions right and produce a solid underdrawing that you can work with. you don‘t need to focus on perfect lines or shadows or details in this stage, that can all come later.

refined basic drawing of a round flower

These gestural drawings are often very loose and spontaneous, they‘re great for warming up and getting down the essence on the paper.

3 Refine, check angles and edges, add solid lines, and volume to your drawing

As a second step, you‘ll want to refine what you have drawn through a solid outline. Again, observing what you draw is much more important than actually placing the line. Drawing is as much as observing and learning to see, as it is about laying down lines.

Take your gesture drawing as a basis and check all the angles and edges against your subject. See where you need to make adjustments. Observe the angles, shapes and curves of your subject. Travel around the contour, and be mindful about the proportions you‘ve already explored. Are they true to what you’ve drawn? If not, make your corrections now.

Again, observe closely before you place your lines. Really notice what your subject looks like before you place your line. Draw what you see, and not what you think you see.

more refined angles of a round flower

You can use your pencil as a measuring help. If you match an angle with your pencil, it’s much easier to translate it to the paper.

Often you will draw several loose lines in the first explorative stage, now is the time to decide on one contour line and define it with a solid line. Try to stay true to what you see in front of you.