Ask HN: Anyone here have good material for learning how to sketch from scratch?

He also has all kinds of recommended other artist channels at the bottom of his Youtube page, and they're all fantastic. Some use traditional media vs digital, some paint vs focus on drawing.

Totally agree. A few thoughts:

1. I watched a show once on TV that used a grid pattern approach that appealed to my engineering aesthetics. They made a transparent square grid pattern that was placed on the desired picture as a temporary overlay. You then create a scaled up grid in very, very light pencil on your desired sketch piece of paper. You finally, started to work the large outer boundaries first and then iterate inwards to the greater details of the face. By doing this, your proportions relative to one another stayed pretty spot on (almost like bumper rails) and yet you could then start to take more liberties with how to express the smaller details:

- light vs. heavy shading

- smudge vs. crisp

- solid vs. wispy, etc ...

While not the fastest way to begin sketching, it gives you confidence and made me better with each one.

2. I've learned that natural forms like Human faces never have well-defined lines - otherwise it looks too cartoon-like. Whether its because of bad eye-sight :-) or the 3-dimensional view, most boundaries tend to be fuzzy, gradations of tone and soft boundaries.

3. After the rough outside boundaries of a face, I focus on the eyes first and foremost. I will obsess on building out the eyes until they "look right" to me. I won't move past this until they feel right. I've found that neglecting or deferring the sketching of the eyes ... has always resulted in a face that I wasn't happy with. I can't express it precisely, but the entire mood, expressiveness and essence of face is evoked by the way you represent the eyes of a face, human or otherwise.

4. After practicing with just pencil sketches first, I then found pastel chalks to be a fun next step to take your finger smudging and shading to a whole new level.

5. Eventually, after some practice and experience - your eye for proportion gets so good that the grid becomes mostly unnecessary. You are then able to freehand other irregular body features much better like closeups of hands and legs as well as animals in general.

_Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain_ is actually one of the best places to start. I know you said you tried it. But try it this way: Ignore all the theory and the stories the author tells. It’s mostly nonsense. But the exercises are actually very good. The trick is to not care about the result and about making progress. I know, that sounds crazy. But it’s true.

Just do it.

Go through reams of cheap paper. Happily throw most of the drawings away. Draw anything and everything. Fall in love with nothing. It’s like practicing scales for a musician. If you get a good drawing every now and then, then cool. If not, don’t worry about it.

It’s gonna take some time.

Be prepared to adjust your expectations as to what a good drawing is. It will change, drastically, over time. The way you draw will emerge rather than be something you develop or manage. Frustrating, I know. But the basics have to develop organically, like learning to talk.

Learning to draw is much more about learning to see than making marks. You think you can see things, but what you are really doing is recognizing things. Any normal adult has the motor skills to make a controlled mark. But we don’t know how to make a mark that the brain will read as something. If it was just a matter of reproducing something that’s in front of you, then tracing would work. But nearly all tracings suck as drawings.

Having said all that, start reading anything you can find on the subject. Be prepared to ignore most of it. You are finding your own path.

You can look through my history on ycombinator more discussion and to to see lists of books that are worth your time. But look on your own too. If you find anything new and different, please share.

As far as goals, they are great things to have. But expect them to change and evolve. Why shouldn’t they. As you get better, your tastes will change. Things you saw that seemed wonderful, may suddenly be full of flaws. Things you disdained may suddenly reveal their secret appeal.

It’s an adventure as well as a skill. And the learning never stops. I’m in my 60s and have been drawing seriously since my early teens.

I’m just getting started.

> I’m just getting started.

I think this is intended to be encouraging, but to me it has the opposite effect. If it's going to take me 45 years to just get started, then I won't waste my time on it, I'll do something else instead.

Is it possible that you're not just getting started, but you are still learning things, albeit at a much slower rate than you were 45 years ago?