DRAWING: what is the best way to get started if you haven’t drawn b...

If you haven’t drawn for years or if you have never drawn in your life, but you feel there is an artist living deep inside of you, the best way to do is to start with simple techniques and then, step by step to learn drawing and painting landscapes and portraits, using watercolor, colored pastel, oil, ink… Anything you like.

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How and where to start?

I’m not a professional artist, I used to draw when I was in school (many years ago from now). When I decided to refresh my skills a few years ago I enrolled a drawing course in a Design School, bought art materials the teacher said to buy and one beautiful Saturday morning I came in my new art class. We were kind of 20 people between 20 and 50 years old with absolutely different backgrounds and motivations. There were people like me who had used to draw in their childhood but had become professional in another field. We wanted to remember what we had learnt once and may be to apply it in some way in our future life. There were others who had never drawn in their life and were looking for some creative activity, there were also practicing designers and photographers who wanted to improve their artistic skills.

Best material for beginners (my experience)

I was wondering how the teacher was going to organize our class and what task she would give us. How to not fear the very beginners and to not disappoint those who already had some basis? The answer was simple: sauce drawing sticks.

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To tell you the truth, I am not sure how exactly I should name this material in English. Tell me please if you know. Writing this post, I found out different names: sauce crayons, silky smooth drawing crayons, Russian drawing sauce crayons… Anyway, you can see it on the picture.

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Sauce drawing sticks are really great for your first drawing exercises. They are soft, easy to erase, you can wet them or leave them dry, depending on what effect you need.

Even if the first task was not easy (we had to draw a drapery), we all did great.

Sauce stick are absolutely fantastic to learn working with shapes and shadows.

Here is my first drawing after almost 17 years of non-drawing.

And here is another one I did later, using dark colored paper and clear colors to show contrasts.

After that it was much easier to start drawing with pencil, charcoal, pastel.

This material has only one disadvantage: after drawing your hands are really a mess. Especially if you’ve got sensitive hand skin, putting latex gloves to avoid irritations may be a good idea.