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Comment by enhdless | Hacker News Reader

I'm trying to learn to draw.

I feel comfortable enough with my technical skills where I feel like I can pick up a new language or framework with relative ease, so I want to switch gears and improve my drawing and visual communication skills. I believe that any project can benefit from a compelling visual component.

For now, I've been trying to start slow and just have fun; for example, telling myself to do three quick sketches of my dog every day and keep up a habit. Eventually I'd like to follow some more structured exercises and resources, like https://drawabox.com/.

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Learning to draw is something anyone can do and is incredibly rewarding. It activates a huge part of your brain (visual) that starts firing when you see all sorts of scenes, faces, patterns, colors in real life. Try the book "drawing on the right side of the brain". Another good one is the Bargue sculpture drawing course.

Thanks for your recommendations!

Yea, right, until you try to get perspective correct.

If you understand this, you are a genius:

https://crafts.stackexchange.com/questions/3316/how-to-measu...

Don't worry about perspective drawing. This is a much more technical subject, separate from the skill of "drawing what you see".

I want to be able to draw from imagination. Drawing from real life has no appeal to me (though drawing realistically does).

Any artist that draws from imagination will tell you to draw from real life. Once you get that down it's waaaay easier since you have strong foundations in figures, perspective and forms. No one just started drawing from imagination.

The pure act of representional drawing (drawing what you see, "copying it") needs just two basic actions: measuring and comparing.

For that, you have to teach yourself how to see things in the most objective way possible, without meaning. Don't see a dog or a head or a leg, but just a mass of shapes, lines, areas. Measure them, compare them. It's all about that.

People think drawing is in the hand, but it is in the eyes and in learning how to see things differently.

Good luck! It can be very therapeutic and rewarding.

I recommend John Ruskin's classic "The Elements of Drawing".

"Supposing then that you are ready to take a certain amount of pains, and to bear a little irksomeness and a few disappointments bravely, I can promise you that an hour's practice a day for six months, or an hour's practice every other day for twelve months, or, disposed in whatever way you find convenient, some hundred and fifty hours' practice, will give you sufficient power of drawing faithfully whatever you want to draw, and a good judgment, up to a certain point, of other people's work: of which hours if you have one to spare at present, we may as well begin at once."

I actually started Drawabox for the same reason, and I must say that I like that change of mindset. It's feels good to start digging into something that is not directly related to software.

I am trying to learn how to draw too and finding it very hard. I am using a Wacom tablet and man is hard to draw like that. I am learning face drawing at the moment and it seems impossible. More practice I guess.

I am going to try to get better at the thing that foils me the most: faces

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