Find private art lessons in El Paso

What is the best website to learn drawing?

There are plenty of great websites to learn drawing online. The best websites to learn drawing if you are a kid are: easypeasyandfun.com or drawingnow.com, but whether you are a child or adult and you’d like to learn drawing, then Superprof offers a wide variety of lessons and is by far your best option. 

What should I learn first in drawing?

Learning to draw can be a lot of fun, but it can also seem hard to do without any guidance. This is why there are a few basic concepts to learn to perceive first. One of them is proportions. You can start by drawing objects or shapes, lines, and simple elements, or copying a drawing you like that might not be too hard. You can learn how to structure the figure’s head, upper body, or full body.

Everything at the beginning is about proportions. Imagine that you are trying to draw a little statue you own. The first thing will be to draw a soft line horizontally, splitting the page in two, and try to imagine the statue split in two and figure out the part that will go on the upper half and the part of the statue that will go in the lower half. That immediately will give you a sense of proportion. You can even do the same thing vertically, splitting the page in two: right and left. Then think of the statue split vertically into two halves. This quadrant system is a great tool for keeping an eye on the proportions. Many people think drawing is hard, but that is because they don’t know the techniques that are available to keep the drawing looking correct, and so the first try may feel unbalanced, out of proportion and ugly. This idea of dividing the page in four is a very common technique and it is a great example of how learning to draw is not based on talent, but rather good techniques to develop your skill.

What are the five basic skills of drawing?

The five basic skills of drawing are Edges, Space, Light and Shadow, Relationships, and the Whole or Gestalt.

Let us start with Edges: when we were kids we were taught to draw different shapes and with it we understood that the shapes are a collection of lines and turns that create the shape. These edges create the shape, a triangle or square, that will be different due to the number of sides. When we draw for example a chair or a hand, this is not so different from what you did when you were drawing shapes, the edges determined the shape. The edges are more intricate when drawing a face or a landscape, but the principle is the same.

Space is how we relate our drawing to their space, meaning the space they take up versus the space that is empty, either surrounding the shape or inside the space. This empty space is what is called negative space. Think of a wheel and how the wheel is defined by the shape and the space that it does not take up surrounding it, but it is also defined by the negative space in the middle of it.

Light and Shadow is a fundamental element of images. Images are visible because of their relationship to light and shadow. There’s always a source of light and how the light reacts with the shape is what gives realism to the image. Shading is a possibility of expression as well that will progressively turn light into shadow.

The relationship is what makes shapes or lines be in relation to each other. This creates a sense of proportion, perspective, etc. Think of an ant that you draw perfectly, taking up most of the page and then a little truck next to it that is half its size. This won’t make sense in the real world and it would either mean there’s a perspective that allows us to see the ant bigger than the truck or that the drawing does not care about the size of the elements or that it is experimenting with it.

Finally there is Whole or Gestalt and this is the ability to put the first four skills in action, all of them at once.