12 Drawing Tips for Beginners – Digital Art — THE BEGINNER DRAWING COURSE

1. Use a Drawing Tablet with pressure sensitivity

When you get a drawing tablet, you’ll be able to plug it into your USB port.

There are drawing tablets where you’re drawing directly on the screen, and drawing tablets wherein you’re only drawing on a surface while looking at the monitor.

The more layers of pressure sensitivity a tablet has, the more you’ll be able to add nuance and subtlety to your work with ease.

There are many tablet brands on the market – Wacom, Huion, XP-Pen, iPad, etc…

Since this isn’t a post about which tablet you should get, you can spend some time doing research if you don’t have one already. The main point is that you’re going to want to use a tablet, and that it should have pressure sensitivity to augment your workflow.

2. Get comfortable with the basic tools

Tools are the many little squares and menus that are designedly nestled in whatever program you happen to be using. Usually there are only a few you need to concern yourself with for the purposes of actually drawing and erasing.

When you open your digital art program for the first few times, it pays to spend a good chunk of your energy exploring the tools. Seeing what hotkey activates them, what they do, and how they feel.

Think about how you can implement them into your process or what situation would warrant switching to these tools.

Mostly, you’ll likely be using a drawing tool, an erasing tool, a selection tool, and a move/transform tool. Those are the bread and butter of digital art, so make sure that you prioritize learning how those operate, as they’ll make your life as an artist much easier.

3. Avoid using too many brushes, pencils, etc…

This one is ultimately about simplicity. Some artists have the tendency to spread themselves quite thin over a large array of brushes and tools. They hop onto the next one before ever growing comfortable with the previous one. It’s not the best strategy for learning, and certainly not the best strategy for gaining the consistent results necessary to hearten yourself to continue learning.

So stick with the basic two or three the program offers. Or if you do download and add additional brushes/tools, pick one or two from that pack and stick with them. Make sure they’re very utilitarian and good for a variety of purposes, and not just for special-use cases.

4. Leverage layers

Layers are one of the best reasons to go digital as an artist. They allow you the freedom to sketch, refine, and test.

Learning the layer menu in whatever are program you’re teaching yourself is crucial. Learn how to drag them around, turn them on an off, merge them, rearrange them, and so on. A mastery of the layer menu will allow you to augment your process, and make your workflows much more efficient.

5. Don’t get too dependent on ctrl + z

Or Cmd+Z For your Mac users.

This one is pretty simple. If your fingers are constantly on that shortcut, you might be developing a dependency. That dependency on the “undo” function can harm your output, learning, and create crutches you’ll have to free yourself from later.

While it is a potent tool or making sure you don’t destroy your work, make sure you don’t get so addicted to it that you’re unable to finish your work. If you’re always trying to get the “perfect line” or being overly meticulous for the sake of perfection, you’ll advance slower than those who own their mistakes and fix them in other ways.

6. Do simple exercises to warm up.

Draw circles. Elipses. Squares. Make congruent marks all across the page. Get a feel for drawing straight lines. All of these exercises help you to not only temper your drawing ability, but they’ll get you used to your digital medium. 15 minutes of focused exercises is all you need before you begin sketching.

Here’s a video I made a while back showcasing some drawing exercises.