How to Draw Anything Without the Fear
The blank-page terror is really a scale problem. Break the subject down and the fear has nowhere to stand.
Maya Okafor
Contributing Artist ·
"I can’t draw that" almost always means "I am trying to draw the whole thing at once." Nobody can. The people who look fearless are just breaking it into pieces faster than you.
See the big shapes first
A bicycle is two circles and some lines. A face is an egg and a cross. Squint at any subject until the detail falls away and only the big masses remain. Draw those, and the details have somewhere to live.
- Block the largest shapes before any line work. Get the proportions of the masses right first.
- Draw what you see, not what you know. You know a wheel is round; from an angle it is an ellipse.
- Build a visual library. Draw the same thing ten times and the eleventh stops being scary.
Gabrielle Brickey teaches this shape-first approach at Two Tap, and Alexandra Fintova has a whole method for drawing any object with confidence. Both are aimed squarely at this fear.
You are not bad at drawing. You are trying to draw too much at once.Maya Okafor
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