Learning How to Draw

Hey guys, my name is Stan Prokopenko and this is the beginning of my Drawing Basics course.

I think that anyone can learn how to draw, just like anyone can learn how to speak.

Two-year-olds learn how to speak a language and drawing is a visual language.

If you learn the grammar and the vocabulary of the visual language, you can communicate with pictures.

I think you'll find this course refreshingly simple, fun, and enlightening.

You'll learn the most important fundamental concepts for drawing anything.

And soon you'll be able to draw pictures out of your imagination or from reference. There are no prerequisites.

This course is the prerequisite. You don't need any past experience or fancy drafting tables.

This is all you need. A sketchbook and a pencil.

Later in this course we'll play around with some markers, ink, maybe some charcoal to change things up, but that will be optional.

You can do the whole course with just paper and pencil. Can I learn to draw? Am I too old? Am I not talented?

The short answer is no, of course not. Anyone can learn to draw.

What separates good and bad artists is simply how much time they've spent drawing.

So let's take a look at what really matters to be a great artist.

If you can write the alphabet, you have enough hand-eye coordination to draw a masterpiece.

Tight, complicated little letters require hand-eye coordination.

You can see my left-handed alphabet looks pretty terrible, but the difference between my right-handed drawing and left-handed drawing isn't as big.

My left-handed drawing is a bit wobbly and the strokes aren't as pretty, but it still has all the same elements, the same fundamental understanding of what it takes to make a good drawing.

It looks three-dimensional, it's just a little more messy, which some people might prefer.

So learning to draw isn't just about training your hands, although that's a big part of it, but it's also about training your mind.

Understanding perspective, how light affects form so that you can shade properly, these are things you learn about

and then you practice so that you can get an intuitive understanding of them.

And equally important, personal choices like composition and storytelling.

These are what makes an artist an artist. There

are great artists with arthritis or severe vision problems who power through or work around the limits of their body,

and they do good work. Don't forget what our homie Michelangelo said. The artist paints with his head, not his hands.

physical and intellectual. So as a beginner, you'll need to work on the physical and the intellectual aspects of drawing.

The physical is training your mind to have the subtle control of your body and execute any type of stroke with confidence.

The reason you can write the alphabet effortlessly is because you've been practicing that your whole life.

The physical aspect is also training your eyes to properly see proportions, values, colors, and edges.

This will take many years of practice. It's similar to learning a sport.

Draw things around you and draw a lot. Training your eyes and your hands is about repetition.

It's about physically doing it a bunch of times, constantly analyzing what you're looking at and trying to put it down on paper.

When you can't figure out how to draw something or why your drawing doesn't look like what you imagined,

it's because of gaps in your knowledge. That's where the intellectual side comes in.

The intellectual aspect is the science of how we see the world.

That's the visual language, and you'll learn it in this course.

You'll study how light affects form, how we represent form using lines, shapes, values, and edges,

learn perspective, 3d form, gesture, there's a lot to learn but every time you learn a new concept it's exciting because it's a chance to get better.

If you're not already enrolled, go to proko.com slash drawing and get the premium version of this course.

That's the only way to get all the lessons, all the projects, demonstrations, and critique videos.

It'll be worth it and I'll set you up with a strong foundation for your path to drawing mastery.

If you're just here for the free stuff, that's cool too. As always, I'll continue to release a portion of the lessons for free.

All those lessons will be put into the drawing basics playlist, which I'll link to in the description.

The Mindset If you have images in your mind, but you just can't get them on the paper, it means that you're still missing the physical skills or intellectual knowledge.

Oh brother, this guy stinks!

That's why creativity isn't the only part of being an artist.