How Should a Beginner Practise Drawing Every Day?

Thirty minutes a day, with an HB pencil, a 2B pencil, a sketchbook and something to draw. That is the whole kit and, for the first month, the whole routine. Spend the half hour on observation exercises rather than on finished pictures, and draw the same few simple objects more than once.

The clocks go back on Sunday 25 October, which brings darker evenings with them. A lamp, a mug and a sketchbook make a good use of one, and a daily drawing habit is easier to start now than in the long light of June, when everything else is calling.

Why thirty minutes, and why daily

The drawing from observation course lists its time needed as 30 minutes a day, and it says people who draw for that long each day for three months see marked improvement. The reason it gives is that what improves is the eye, not the hand. You are learning to put aside the symbol for a thing (the almond shape we all draw for an eye) and draw what is in front of you instead.

Training the eye responds better to frequent short sessions than to the occasional long one. If thirty minutes feels like a lot, take fifteen. What matters more is that it happens most days, at roughly the same time, in the same chair. Habits attach to places.

What you need, and what you don't

The course's kit list costs under £10:

• A hardback sketchbook, A5 or A4, at £4 to £10. A5 is pocket-sized and less intimidating. Buy a cheap one so you don't feel precious about filling it.
• An HB and a 2B pencil, £1 to £3 for the pair. Staedtler or Faber-Castell are reliable, and cheap supermarket pencils are fine to begin with.
• A putty eraser, £1 to £3. It lifts graphite without damaging the paper.
• A subject that holds still: a mug, a shoe, a piece of fruit, your own hand.
• One lamp, which you probably own already.

The course is blunt about the rest. Light boxes, drawing boards, blending stumps, charcoal and coloured pencils are not needed, and buying them before you start is a form of procrastination. That tallies with the experience of most beginners: researching pencils is comfortable, and drawing is not.

The first four weeks, day by day

The course describes weeks one to four as the stage for simple objects, blind contour exercises and value studies, and its aim is building the habit. Here is one way to lay that out. Treat it as a scaffold and move things around as you like.

Days 1 to 3: blind contour

Put an object in front of you. Place the pencil on the paper, look only at the edge of the object, and move your pencil as slowly as your eye moves along the edge. Do not look at the page. Draw the whole outline that way.

The result will be distorted and odd, and the course says that is correct, because you are training the link between eye and hand, not producing something tidy. It recommends doing it daily for a week. The blind contour drawing side quest is a five to ten minute introduction if you want a gentler first go.

Spend the whole half hour on it if you like: three or four contours of different objects, each taking a few minutes.

Days 4 and 5: negative space

Draw the space around the object rather than the object. Look at the gap between the handle of a mug and its body, or the air between your fingers as your hand rests on the table. The course points out that the brain has no existing symbol for these shapes, so it draws them more accurately, and the object arrives as a by-product.

Days 6 and 7: measuring with the pencil

Hold the pencil at arm's length, close one eye, and use your thumb to measure a distance on the subject. Then compare it to other distances. How wide is the mug compared to its height? How big is the gap beside the handle? This is how portrait artists establish proportion before committing to detail, and it takes ten minutes to learn.

Week 2: one object, one lamp

Put one object on a table with a lamp to one side, so there is a clear light side and shadow side. Work through the course's still life exercise: two minutes of looking before you draw, a light HB silhouette, a proportion check, the shadow areas blocked in with the 2B, a negative space check, the cast shadow, and finally the darkest tones, with the highlights lifted out with the putty eraser. The course asks for roughly 70% looking and 30% marking, which feels wrong at first.

Draw the same object on days 8, 9 and 10. The course puts this plainly: repetition with the same subject reveals improvement faster than drawing something new each time, and you will see in the third drawing what you missed in the first.

Use days 11 to 14 on a second object, shoe or fruit, following the same steps.

Weeks 3 and 4: add one thing at a time

Now vary a single element each day rather than everything at once. Move the lamp and see how the shadow changes. Draw two objects together. Try drawing your own hand, which is always available and never holds quite still. The course advises leaving faces and figures until you have two or three months of object drawing behind you, and it gives the reason: complicated subjects early on produce frustration rather than learning.

If you want a looser warm-up before the main session, the gesture drawing side quest is two minutes to start with, and the course defines gesture drawing as fast, loose marks of 30 seconds to two minutes each.

How to structure the thirty minutes

A simple pattern holds up well:

1. Five minutes warm-up. A blind contour of whatever is nearest.
2. Twenty minutes main exercise. That day's work from the schedule above.
3. Five minutes review. Put the drawing beside the previous one. Write the date in the corner. Note one thing to try next time.

The review matters more than it sounds. The middle stretch of learning, roughly weeks three to eight, is where progress is real but too slow to notice day to day. Dated pages make it visible, and the people who quit usually do so just before it shows.

Things that get in the way

Buying kit instead of drawing. Two pencils cover most of what the course needs. Anything more can wait until you can say what problem it solves.

Judging against finished art. Comparing a twenty minute still life with a gallery painting is comparing two different activities. The useful comparison is this week's drawing of the mug against last week's.

Starting with a face. It is a fine ambition. Do it in month three, not week one.

Waiting for the right mood. Draw at the same time, whatever the mood. The first few minutes are often the worst, and they pass.

After the first month

The course's mastery track moves on at months two to six to ellipses, foreshortening, more complex forms, still lifes with several objects and interesting light, and portrait gesture sketches. Perspective belongs here too, and the one-point perspective side quest is a short way in. For now, a month of dated pages in a sketchbook is a better result than any amount of kit.

The short version

• Thirty minutes a day is the course's figure. Fifteen is better than nothing, and frequency matters more than length.
• You need a hardback sketchbook, an HB and a 2B pencil, a putty eraser and one lamp: under £10 in all.
• Weeks one to four: blind contour, negative space, pencil measuring, then a lamp-lit still life of one object.
• Draw the same object three days running. The third drawing shows what you missed in the first.
• Spend about 70% of the time looking and 30% making marks.
• Leave faces and figures until you have two or three months of object drawing behind you.
• Write the date on every page, and compare this week's drawing with last week's.
• The full method is in the free drawing from observation course.