Drawing is a lot of fun, and my life would not be nearly as enjoyable as it  is now if I didn’t know how to draw. Learning to draw is not as hard as  some people make it out to be, or as your own experiences might have told you.  The key is to start out with the basic drawing techniques. Picking up and  eventually mastering these simple techniques will form the foundation of your  entire drawing adventure.

First, it is very important that you stay mentally  focused. Teaching yourself to draw naturally means you are training  your brain to understand how to draw, and this is a mindset that can only be  developed through practice, practice, and more practice. So keep at it and do not give up. Keep yourself motivated, don’t throw any of your drawings  out, no matter how bad you think they are. Being able to look back at your older  drawings as you are learning is a fantastic way to stay aware of the progress  you have made.

Doodling, as silly as it may sound, is actually a great way  for you to start developing your skills. Doodling allows you to start putting  lines on paper and not worry about the outcome, this is the beginning of  training your brain to think differently when it comes to drawing.

Similarly, sketching is a great way to keep your brain free  from what it thinks drawing is. Contrary to doodling, with sketching  you do focus on the outcome, but not on the particular way you make that outcome  real. You just freely draw what you want to draw. Again, what it eventually  looks like does not matter, only that you are training your brain to draw.

Once you’ve got the hang of getting some of your creative thoughts on paper,  even if it’s not exactly what you want, you are making progress. It is then that  you should consider moving on to slightly more advanced techniques, such as:

Contour drawing: Contour drawing means that you only draw  the outlines of the objects you are drawing. Not the details, not the shading, just the outlines. You can take an entire scene, the very room you are  now in, for example, and just draw the outlines of the objects you see. This is  an easy way to train your brain to see the individual lines an object is  composed of, and not the object as a whole.

Another technique to use is hatching. With  hatching, you just draw the shape of an object with straight parallel lines,  usually diagonally. Like contour drawing, hatching allows your brain to focus on  the shape of an object, rather than identifying what the object is, which is  what your brain normally wants to do. You can take this one or two steps beyond  and add depth or additional detail by using the proximity and/or thickness of  the parallel lines to determine tonal value. To get even more advanced, you can  use crosshatching, which is to say that you create multiple  overlapping layers of lines crossing eachother to create even more depth and  detail. Crosshatching by itself is a commonly used shading technique.

To get used to shading and lighting, you can apply tonal drawing techniques. By only drawing the darker values of the object you are  drawing, and therefore accentuating the lighter values, you are getting used the  the concept of depth, and lighting. Tonal drawing means that you do not use  strong edges or lines. Drawing the shades is easily accomplised by blurring the  areas that are darker. I would suggest using a blending stump instead of your  fingers, as your fingers leave an oily residue that can damage the drawing over  time

One last essential technique you have to know and conquer is perspective drawing. Look at how the lines of an object  converge as they approach the horizon. The point at which they converge is  called the vanishing point. You can train yourself to draw in perspective by  starting out with simple geometric shapes, and moving on to more complex shapes  as you get the hang of it.