Ask HN: How do I learn drawing?

I had the exact same problem as you two years ago. I as very bad at design and drawing. So I decided that I would try to fix that. So I bought a book [1]. Basically you start with easy shapes, like an Apple, and you learn steps by steps more difficult things, like shades, ... The book works for 30 days.

At the end of the 30 days it was clear I progressed a lot. But it was also clear that I hated doing the challenge. So I gave up with drawing, but still recommend the book

[1] https://www.amazon.fr/You-Can-Draw-30-Days/dp/0738212415

"The New Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain: A Course in Enhancing Creativity and Artistic Confidence" by Betty Edwars.

She taught drawing classes and discovered that one reason why people is bad at drawing is that they symbolize what they see before drawing it. For example, when we see a face, we tend to focus about the eyes and mouth and ignore other features like the front. That contributes to a distorted representation that is reflected in the drawing.

She devised a series of exercises to avoid that problem. For example, try to draw a picture upside down, or try to draw an object shape using negative space (you focus on the shapes outside the object).

PS: I found that book in The Last Psychiatrist blog: https://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2011/10/how_to_draw_not_abou...

I think if you want this from an engineering perspective then Mark Kistler's You Can Draw in 30 Days is a good bet. It's not about how to see (unlike Drawing With the Right Side of the Brain) but if you want to draw certain types of things from your imagination, then it might do what you need and doesn't need too much equipment etc.

Ultimately if you want to be good at drawing, I suspect you have to be prepared to invest a fair amount of time - if you enjoy it won't feel like that, but if you don't then there are probably diminishing returns.

I don't have problems with diagrams.

I want to learn a few styles of drawing. One of them is cartoonish like style. I see such a style pretty often when reading articles from HN.

By doing 10,000 bad drawings, Chuck Jones once wrote.