How to Think of What to Draw
from wikiHow - The How to Manual That You Can EditSometimes it seems like the hardest part of drawing is starting, facing that blank page. How do you know what to draw when you could draw anything? Here are some tips to get you started.
Steps
- Doodle. Even if you just make squiggles, it will get you into the mindset of putting pencil to paper. Possibly a shape or texture will suggest something to draw, or perhaps the doodling will just serve as a warm-up.
- Warm up with a two- or three-minute "gesture sketch" of an object or person in sight. This could be a self-portrait if you turn on your web cam and look at the screen or set up a mirror. Use an egg timer and try to draw what you see within three minutes. This is a great warm-up because you don't expect it to come out well or finished, but may surprise yourself at how much you can get down in such a short time. It's also easier to get friends to pose for two-minute gestures than for fifteen or twenty minutes at a time.
- Play with colors. If you draw with colors, try mixing various ones together and see what happens. What do they remind you of? Try palette generating tools online, too[1][2]. What colors attract or intrigue you? Open a box of colored pencils, pastels, crayons, or oil pastels so that you can see all the colors in spectrum order. That can be inspiring all by itself.
- Try something easy that you've drawn many times before. Sometimes going back to basics can help you get past a freeze if you're losing confidence in your drawing ability. If you practiced drawing eyes for weeks, draw some eyes and vary them. If you have trouble doing eyes but liked drawing flowers, then draw a flower to begin. Build on that to create confidence to go further.
- Set yourself a challenge. Is there something you always wanted to draw well, but never thought you could? Now might be the time to tackle it and see if your latest attempt is better than the last. Find photo references, look in the mirror for a self-portrait, or set out the interesting object you always wanted to draw well like a clear glass under a lamp and study it. Sketch it loosely first to establish the basic shape and proportions, also to place it on the page. Then start shading and detailing.
- Look around. What is in your surroundings right now? Is it special or ordinary? If you want to start with something easy, set up a still-life arrangement with objects that are basically cubes, cylinders, or spheres - an opaque cup, a box, a book, a tennis ball. Sketch it rapidly and shade it to look three-dimensional.
- Introspect. What is important to you? What do you feel right now? How might that translate into an image?
- Copy a master drawing or painting. Vermeer's "Girl with a Pearl Earring" or Leonardo da Vinci's self-portrait, one of Turner's landscapes, any painting or drawing by a classical master can be inspiring and lead you to strengthen your skills. Surf online searching on the master's name to see examples of his work or read art history sites to choose a master to draw from. This is a good break if you've been struggling with something like composition or depth and want to understand how great artists of the past achieved their results.
- Draw from a photograph. If there's nothing around to draw and you have enough still-lifes of the junk in your room, go looking for photographs that might be interesting to draw.
- Draw things you like. Are you especially fond of gardens? Dogs? You may be looking at your subject in detail, so choose something you want to explore.
- Do something else. If you sit there staring at a page and nothing is coming to mind, find something else to do for a while. Often, a change of focus will help with creativity. Paradoxically, washing dishes or house cleaning and chores are good for stimulating creativity. They stretch your left brain organizing things and tidying up, freeing your right brain to daydream and develop an itch to draw. This works for writing too.
- Clean and organize your art supplies. Sometimes, it's hard to get started if you can't find the materials you need. Handling your art supplies while putting them away in their places will also start giving you ideas of things you can do with them. If you have accumulated a lot of different supplies for different mediums, this may be the block in itself - too much interesting clutter, too many attractive distractions.
- Supplies may not be inviting or easy to use if they're dirty. Pastels jumbled up in a box all look gray. Watercolor pans may look brown and muddy from other colors mixed into them from the last painting session. Dozens of colored pencils out of order may look like a confusing mess and make it hard for you to choose the exact reddish brown you want.
- Choose one medium and one surface or sketchbook based on what's most interesting to you while putting the rest away. Organize everything else back where it belongs and settle down to get started.
- Supplies may not be inviting or easy to use if they're dirty. Pastels jumbled up in a box all look gray. Watercolor pans may look brown and muddy from other colors mixed into them from the last painting session. Dozens of colored pencils out of order may look like a confusing mess and make it hard for you to choose the exact reddish brown you want.
- Read, listen to music, dance, or do another, different creative activity. What shape, color, and texture do these activities have? What picture (concrete or abstract) do they form?
- Watch clouds, a fire, or look at the texture on a wall, holes in the ceiling, or stars in the sky. You could draw the clouds themselves or anything suggested by them. What patterns do you think you see?
- Try people. Faces come in all kinds of shapes and sizes, of course, but hands, feet, and body shapes can be interesting, too. Try actions, postures, and scenes if you don't feel like doing a portrait.
- Try animals. They can be familiar ones, such as the family cat, bird, or dog, or they can be animals in nature.
- Try plants. Botanical illustration has a long history. Careful botanical illustration was used for identification and classification before photography became widespread. If you're not going for realism, you could also do an artistic interpretation of a plant.
- Consult a book. You can read a book about drawing for ideas and practice subjects, or you can read any unrelated book, fiction or nonfiction, to get your mind moving in a new direction.
- Sleep on it. Sometimes, creative bursts can come in dreams or in the chaotic thoughts and half dreams just as you fall asleep. Keep a notebook by the bed for these ideas. If inspiration does not strike, at least you will be well-rested.
- Draw abstracts, patterns, and shapes. Play with colors and shapes. Remember that Celtic knotwork is also an abstract pattern. If you want something to relax you with carefully rendered intricate details working out elegant border designs and patterns can be fun.
- Look back through old sketchbooks for ideas. Something you drew a long time ago may not have come out the way you wanted. If you can see what went wrong with it, you're halfway to doing it better. That can be inspiration in itself, reminding you of how much you've grown. You might also find gems you didn't realize had come out so well. Those can be inspiring too.
- Build habits around your drawing and painting process. Do you always listen to music while painting, or always listen to certain music? Do you like to light a stick of incense before starting? Maybe it would help if you always clear your drafting table and clean your pens before you start. Build up a short, simple ritual of activities you do in the same order every time you start that set conditions a little different from everything else in life. It doesn't matter what you choose to make your environment more art-friendly, it's most important that these things become reminders and you build a habit of drawing whenever those reminders are around.
- Try daily drawing or daily painting and blog it, or keep an art journal. Even a two-minute gesture sketch every day is a good way to build a habit and keep up a rhythm of creativity. In the busiest life, it's possible to make time for a two- or five-minute activity. When you post your results online, that becomes a social reward system. Friends will comment on it and usually compliment it. The longer you do this, the better your daily art becomes so the swell of social support will get bigger and bigger.
Tips
- It's okay to draw anything you want, any way you want. It doesn't have to be special or important, and it certainly doesn't have to be "right," whatever that means. If you really don't like the result, you can always draw something else.
- Draw often. With practice, you'll find what you prefer to draw and what gives you difficulty or bores you. You'll also get better at the parts that are difficult.
- Keep a sketch book around so that you can make at least a rough sketch when inspiration strikes.
- It's okay to draw things that you have never drawn before. Variety is good practice and it keeps things interesting.
- It's also okay to draw the same thing over and over if you like it or you're not satisfied with how it came out. That can result in a lot of artistic growth along the way or a beautiful series as you change the angle you draw it from, record the changes in a rose from day to day or try different mediums and techniques.
- Try first thing in the morning. Sometimes the mind is most flexible before all the filters are fully awake.
- Draw from a real subject whenever possible, especially if you are going for accuracy. The shape, color, and texture are best captured from the real thing. In some cases, a photograph is a better source, such as if the subject is transitory (a particular sunset, traffic) or not something easily viewed (a sea turtle). Photographs are good for two things: detail and proportions. They are not very good for color or value - light colors overexpose to white and dark colors get far too dark, so judging a photo against similar things you've seen in person is the best way to get color and value accurate. When it's your own photo, it will spark the memory of the moment you snapped it.
- Draw in your own style and find inspiration in whatever makes you feel like drawing.
- Daydream about drawing while riding elevators, standing in line, or otherwise stuck with nothing to do. This will actually improve your drawing skills, especially if you imagine it in detail line by line. Imagine yourself doing it perfectly and you might surprise yourself the next time you do it for real!
- When you sleep, if you dream of people, try to draw them yourself; if you want you can change it up a bit, use color, change up their faces (switch around their eyes and such, move their expressions around).
- Challenge yourself, at least now and then. Don't tell yourself you can't draw this or that, especially not before you've tried. Practice different aspects of the difficult subject separately and then bring them all together. It helps to do small preliminary sketches to establish the layout, so little that you can't get bogged down in detail or worry about getting it right.
- Be creative with no matter what you draw. If you are going to draw an animal, make it special, if you'll draw somebody accessorize him or her. Make it yours, make it you and relate your personality to the drawing
Warnings
- While there's nothing wrong with drawing from a photograph to practice, keep in mind that you may not be able to publish the result if you don't hold the copyright or have permission. Find sources of photos where you can get permission. Some art communities have shared photo libraries from members. Wikipedia photos are often on Wikipedia Commons, read the terms and honor the terms as listed by crediting the photographer or not selling the resulting derivative works. Use your own photos.
- Don't copy a photo too exactly. This is where using your own photos is good because you can remember what the scene really looked like. Photos are good for proportions and details on some things. They have a lot of distortions too. Light colors may overexpose until they're all white. Trees and other dark elements may turn black or nearly black. Color may be dramatically different from reality. Unless you are doing photorealism, copying the degree of detail and hard edged focus on everything in the photo is going to create a disturbing drawing - try to simplify what's there and detail only what's in the most important part of your drawing. Detail the eyes on a portrait but draw the hair as a loose mass of tone or color rather than trying to depict every curl of hair perfectly.