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

His episode 89 - Just Draw - was so useful to me: https://youtu.be/WLqWX7onVmU

"Just getting started", I feel the same with the guitar. Been playing since I was 12, 40 years on with quite a few breaks still love it and having fun will never be a pro! I work with loads of great artists, I really can't draw (but am according to the deeds of my apprenticeship a qualified draftsman!) but still love to doodle and sketch. The awesome artists I teach and work with always amaze me, mostly the really good ones always have a sketch book with them and always doodle. This is the key, love it, practice it and enjoy :-)

A few additional points, as someone who spent several years taking courses in drawing in college.

- Don't get caught on the nerd treadmill of tools-before-effort. You can draw with whatever is in your junk drawer. You can draw well with $40 of different hardness pencils and kneaded erasers from an art supply store. Beyond that is a waste.

- As parent said, practice practice practice. Which means finding time to practice. For which a portable sketchbook and basic portable kit is a huge help.

- (Disagree with parent, here) Find someone(s) who won't hold back to judge your work. You need someone who can say (and who you can handle hearing say) "This part sucks." Because you need to hear that, and work on it, until it doesn't. In professional training this is "jury." One-directional courses (them to you) aren't going to help here, as you need feedback.

- Start drawing from life, because you have an infinite supply of content that all obeys the laws we assume to be true (perspective, lighting, gravity, etc). And you'll be able to tell if it looks correct or not.

- Drawing from pictures can help "freeze" a moment. This is especially important for outdoor light and shadow, as otherwise the sun angle will change while you're working.

- Learn to draw what you see, not a representation of what you see. This means don't draw a symbol of a house, but draw the house in front of you. Focusing on details and working through them methodically helps avoid symbolism. E.g. draw that line, or that corner, not the whole thing.

- Draw with intent: every drawing should have a concrete goal when you're learning. It doesn't have to include everything. Consider including or excluding lighting and shadow, which takes a huge amount of time to get right. E.g. circular mass studies, perspective line work, proportion. Think about what you want in this drawing, and then practice only that.

- Find an art buddy or community. This is the opposite of jury! ;) Where you go when you're feeling like your work sucks and you'll never be good, and they'll remind you of all the ways you're awesome.

Edit: 110% agree with sibling comment re: grids for proportion work, when you're learning. Inability to maintain proportion across the work is a huge source of beginner "doesn't look right"ness. Eventually you'll internalize it, and get better at relative proportion with other things in the drawing, but they're a good crutch to start with.

Two suggestions to add to the many excellent ones already here:

Arthur Wesley Dow’s Composition: A Series of Exercises Selected From a New System of Art Education [0] is a wonderful, wonderful book in the public domain – recently submitted here but didn't get much attention. It is well worth spending a lot of time studying its exercises and examples.

[0] https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/dow-composition/

My second suggestion is more general but it worked wonders for me. I had a teacher years ago whose take-home assignments consisted of extremely rudimentary drawing exercises, starting with drawing a series of straight lines in parallel across a page, then moving on to squares, circles etc but always basic geometric shapes. His point was that drawing is, at its most basic level, a physical skill like many others which require physical and neurological adaptations that can only be improved with practice. In addition to the creating these lines and shapes, one was obliged to pay strict attention to their relation to other marks on the page – your circles could not overlap, for example, and your straight lines must run parallel and start and end at the same page border. The lines had to start and end very definitely at the correct point. He was also keen to examine and correct each student's physical stance in relation to the easel, the light, and the subject, and insisted we draw from the shoulder, not the elbow or wrist, as much as possible. The goal was to train one's whole body to gain full control over where the instrument marks the page.

For some students this practically remedial approach seemed almost insulting and a few would balk at it, but it was just incredible how much even very mediocre drafting skills improved when these exercises were applied diligently, including my own. I'm sorry that I don't know a name for this pedagogical system or a book that explains it.

Honestly, practice practice practice. Don’t try to make that one perfect drawing, make hundreds average ones. The most difficult skill is not how to render the perfect line or gradient but to really “see” what is in front of you and not fill in the gaps.

Photos are nice, I like the website line of action if you want to learn to draw people. Try to draw from real life as much as possible. Draw what is at you desk, your family, people around you in a café. It is much more difficult at the start, but you will progress so much faster.

Also, is there anyone with good recommendations to learn more about (modern) art and art history?