If you want to learn drawing, let me tell you: it's not only fun, but also awakening.
Luckily anybody can learn to draw.
And so can you, no matter what your age or profession are.
Most probably you've been told: if you want to draw you just need to use your eyes.
Just look properly at the subject you want to depict! What a helpful advise ...
You know: It's said much easier than done and makes it too tempting to fall back on mere copy work.
However, when copying others' pictures you should know it's no good way to develop your drawing skills.
Instead you better prefer drawing reality.
You can do your first steps easier when drawing only scenes containing simple objects and start drawing more complicated things like animals and people later.
But always try to draw real scenes! Unfortunately this is only one of a number of obstacles on your way to learning how to draw beautiful and skillfully crafted pictures.
Especially when you want to become more creative read on to learn about the important stations on your way to drawing mastery Your most important prerequisite for learning to draw isn't some special equipment or material, but your very own motivation.
Especially in the beginning you may face setbacks.
Also you'll probably fear failure.
But the more enthusiastic and motivated you are, the easier you can rush over any obstacles and move constantly along the road to success.
Another important thing is to understand your subject.
The better you understand what you want to depict, the better you'll it to paper.
Once you learned to recognize and understand your subject's dimensions and the objects that are composing the scene, reproducing them in the proper proportions, dimensions and perspective will become much easier.
Then, drawing to some extent is just "craftsmanship".
Some of the old masters even had a host of sidekicks who did all this "mechanical" work.
As you want to do your drawings yourself, you need to practice these basic techniques.
You need to learn how to get your lines and shapes in form, create smooth shadings, etc.
The old masters needed their sub workers, so they could focus on the creative part, the whole picture.
And so you need a good foundation of these skills, to have more creativity and fun.
In one of the next parts I'll show several exercises for practicing these basic techniques.
But what makes up a great artist beyond these basic skills? Mostly years of experience resulting in numerous concepts, small ideas and techniques all hidden in the artist's subconscious.
That's one important reason why great artists are not automatically great art teachers.
They know what to do when they are doing it, but it's hard to explain the "why" and "how".
Of course experience will come to you only with time, but there are tips and tricks that will be a shortcut for your drawing career (in one of the next parts).