Is it possible to learn to draw decently without an art education? Isn’t it too late for me to start drawing at 30 (thirty!) Years old or even later? And where to go to study as an adult – to an art school or workshop, to an institute or to private classes with artists? Today I will share my thoughts on this topic. Firstly, I’ll indicate my background in the field of drawing – I don’t have it: 9) Secondly, I will outline the present moment – I draw every day, I like my paintings and art not only me, I conduct video tutorials on drawing and write This post is for you on your art site! And yes, I’m a total self-taught person, only once in my life I attended a drawing lesson (when I was about 7 years old), where we drew a still life for an hour from a samovar, a teapot, a cup and an apple.

Until the age of 27, I was sure that I certainly didn’t know how to draw. If I was given homework at school where I needed to draw an illustration for a read work, I asked my parents to draw something for me, although they also kicked off and had nothing to do with drawing at all, but I was firmly convinced that even they would draw something is better than me. Because to draw a circle without a compass for was something out of the ordinary. And when my neighbor at the desk drew our classmates, I quietly envied her, because being able to draw seemed to me some kind of magical ability, given at birth only to the elect. To draw you need talent! Well, how else ?! And once, when I was 27 years old, out of boredom, I decided to try to draw a person’s eye from a lesson from YouTube (okay, this was my personal challenge).

Over the past few years, what I draw, I realized something:

• Learning to draw on your own is real, but doing without education is, I think, not possible. Self-education is simply necessary – video tutorials on youtube, articles on the Internet, books on drawing, composition, color theory, etc. All materials are publicly available online, take it and study!
• Learning the approaches and drawing techniques will not ruin your original style, if you have one. The main thing is not to accept what you read in students and on sites for some kind of artistic dogma, an unbreakable rule. Creativity is so wonderful that there are no rules, there is the experience of other people that can be studied, but no one forces you to apply it.
• You are sure to learn how to draw if YOU JUST DRAW EVERY DAY! You will not have a chance not to learn if you like to draw and you devote your time to drawing. The ability to draw is a practical skill, it must be studied in practice. Read something in the book, immediately try on paper. Be sure to do all the exercises that are recommended to be done. Draw everything you see or can imagine.
• You can draw from photos, you can draw from nature, you can draw from imagination, you can do anything! But here’s what you can’t do – it’s tracing (translating / copying) the work of other artists and passing them off as yours.
• Copying other people’s work is a great exercise to learn new techniques and advance in the artistic field, but stealing other people’s work is not an ice! Inspire, make remakes, create something new based on what you see – super!

When I was just starting to learn how to draw, there was little that came out of it. I even thought of going to some kind of art educational institution, where you can go through some thoughtful program and start to be able to do everything. But it was not there! I live in Moscow, and if you google “art education for adults”, then some kind of dregs come out. All sorts of art therapy studios, one-day workshops, where they will teach you to draw everything and everything in 4 hours, short-term programs for entertaining bored people and other nonsense. Yes, of course, there is an opportunity to get an education “at an art school” during the day with schoolchildren, but it’s not a fact that they will take you there and generally take them seriously. And about entering an art university with zero knowledge, there’s even nothing to think about.

What can you do? If an adult wanted to learn how to draw, then for him I have two options:

• look for a private teacher (possibly online via skype);
• rely on your strength and do self-education.

If you already have a higher education or you are the one who in your life has already learned something on your own, then you roughly understand how the educational process works. In terms of teaching yourself to draw, you will not find fundamental differences. You need to choose the right literature, find exercises and do them, learn techniques, watch how other people draw (YouTube to help), try everything in practice. Come up with tasks and complete them. Finding a way to share your creativity makes it more fun to draw – for example, you can create an Instagram or YouTube channel about how you learn to draw. Or start your own website / text blog. You can just find a group of like-minded people on the Internet, in courses or among friends. When there is a community, learning becomes easier.

I want to warn you right away, if you are not an artist from God (then you probably would have painted from birth and you didn’t read this article), then progress will not be very fast. Everyone has different abilities, involvement in drawing and so on, but in general, you can hardly expect that you will draw well in a week or a month after the start of classes. Beginners in drawing often quickly give up with the words “this is not mine,” “I have no talent,” “I will not succeed,” when in fact many other people on Earth fail to draw as long as they want, but someone continues and continues to try. I had the opposite situation, at first it seemed to me that I was learning everything so fast that I draw tolerably when not even a month had passed my classes. Over the years, I understand that I am constantly evolving, but even now I am still very far from my “perfect drawing”.

But if I waited while I would paint perfectly, then people probably would not have seen my paintings and drawings for many more years. Or perhaps they would never have seen. After all, there is no limit to perfection: 9) It is important to allow yourself to be an imperfect artist, to show your work to the world, many paintings that are far from some kind of imaginary ideals touch people to the core. If you feel like an artist, then simply DRAW EVERY DAY and gradually expand the theoretical base.

And if you read to this place, then write me a comment.

How are you doing with drawing now?