Introduction

Learning how to draw somewhat adequately is useful to more than just painters. In a business meeting, clear drawings help visualize what you’re trying to say. In a game, imaginative drawings can take the gameplay to another level. Often, ideas are better expressed with quick sketches than trying to put them into words and losing a lot of meaning.

This course, therefore, doesn’t teach you a particular style or set of techniques. It provides a general overview of the principles behind drawing: rendering some image to a 2D plane, like a screen or paper. Principles such as depth, perspective and shading.

Many people start their artistic career at a young age by just copying loads of illustrations (in the style they admire). I want to try a more structured approach. We’ll still be copying lots of simple drawings, but only to help understand the concepts.

These concepts can, once understood, be transferred to any style or drawing you want.

The main advantage is that you don’t waste time learning to draw one specific object or style. You don’t become a “one trick pony” that can only draw beautiful ponies, or beautiful mountain landscapes, and nothing else. Instead, you gain insight in the principles behind any image you’ll ever encounter or create yourself.

You might be afraid that things will be very theoretical and boring. Don’t worry! I don’t like theoretical either. I use many examples, quizzes, images, and to-the-point writing. I focus on the practical aspect: teaching you how to be confident when drawing as quick as possible, so you can use it in real life.

In fact, this course has playful examples! See below. Whenever you learn something new, you can try it right on the webpage, by using my simple drawing tool.

This course was also meant to teach myself how to draw. So I don’t provide examples like “do magic and tada you have a beautiful realistic owl”, but instead show my own mistakes and process as well.

I recommend you read through the whole course once. Only then pick your specialization. Even if you only want to draw simple and crude cartoons, you’ll still need many of the principles discussed here.

Of course, I need some style to showcase the principles. For that I use a simple lineart style, which aims to be realistic but without texturing or adding details.