What is the most difficult thing you had to master in becoming an artist? If you’re anything like me, it was learning to draw from life....
Drawing Tips Learn to sketch and draw better with these tutorials
At EmptyEasel, we've heard every drawing question possible. . .
After all, learning how to draw or how to sketch is the first thing every artist needs to master. But how do you know which drawing techniques to practice? Should you practice drawing from life? What about drawing from photographs? What's the best way to learn to draw?
To answer those questions (and many more!) we've published a huge library of free, easy drawing tutorials and tips that make it simple to improve at drawing without paying for expensive drawing classes.
So whether you're learning to use graphite, charcoal, pen and ink or colored pencils, or you've got a random question like how to erase pen marks from paper you're in the right place—our step by step drawing lessons are here to help!
Check out all our free drawing tutorials below:
Hey everyone! This tutorial will hopefully help you to draw a realistic eye. If you want a more in-depth video tutorial for this process, just click...
I learned so much from the binge watching painting videos on YouTube, that I decided to see what drawing videos I could find. Spoiler Alert! There are some stunning artists working in dry media, too! So today, I’m sharing over 50 of those “how to draw” videos. I’ll start with the videos that apply to all drawing mediums, and then share several videos for specific...
I remember when I first started trying to learn how to draw. . . it was actually incredibly frustrating. :) As much as I tried to...
I have been involved with art ever since I was a child and studied fine art in college. For years I worked mostly in pen and...
I always wished I could draw. I longed to be able to capture on paper what I saw out in the real world. Inspiration would strike and I’d try again. . . only to end up with the same result: a drawing that looked more like the flat, two-dimensional hieroglyphs you’d find on an Egyptian tomb, not anything I’d witnessed in real life. I was...
Today I am happy to share with you my process of making portraits using colored ballpoint pens on paper. For a drawing like this, I start...
I’ve always loved drawing realistic clouds floating above my landscapes, but lately my interest in “cloud portraits” has grown to the point where I’d rather just...
Most professional colored pencil artists recommend that new artists buy the best pencils they can afford. I usually make that recommendation as well. Starting out with the right tools gives you a much more accurate picture of the medium, no matter what the medium is. But there are times when the better choice is to start with something other than the best. So today, I...
Gesture drawing is an incredibly useful exercise for improving one’s art. Not only does it help with understanding general anatomy when drawing from life, but the...
One thing every colored pencil artist can agree on that colored pencils are a slow medium. There’s just no way around it. If your chosen medium...
When your medium is capable of making only a limited number of stroke types, and you make art by layering marks, you need to get everything you can out of every mark you make. Every mark should help you create the texture or value (or both) of your subject. That begins with the first mark you put on paper and doesn’t end until you make...
Every artist across the ages has spent at least part of their early years looking for the perfect drawing or painting method. Some continue that search...
Over the course of the last couple of weeks, we’ve looked at drawing a landscape on sanded art paper. I began the series by describing the...
Last time, I began a tutorial showing you how to draw a landscape on sanded art paper. In that article, we worked through the first layers of color and ended with a solvent blend. Here’s how our landscape looked after the first blend. For this article, we’ll be working through the drawing for the second time and adding more values and layers. I continued using...
Last summer I did a lot of experimenting with colored pencil on sanded art paper. Despite having done a piece or two a few years back,...
Ever wonder what’s the most difficult—and most time consuming—part of a landscape to draw? If you’re like me, it’s the grass. Even if your composition only...
In today’s article, I want to show you step-by-step how to draw a lush forest of trees on sanded art paper. What? Sanded art paper with colored pencils? Yes! I realize that using colored pencils on sanded art paper might sound contradictory. After all, colored pencils are a medium designed for lots of detail, and that usually requires a very smooth surface—if there’s one thing...
Colored pencil artists are always looking for ways to speed up their creative process. Most often, that means finding faster ways to apply and blend color...
Who’s your worst art critic? Be honest! It’s you, isn’t it? But it’s also true you’re the person best-suited to correctly evaluating your work, because one...
Getting bright colors on a dark background can be a challenge if your favorite medium is colored pencil. The reason is simple. Most colored pencils are translucent. No matter how heavily you layer them, the color of the paper shows through to some extent, and influences the new color. You have to use a lot of layers—or a lot of pressure—to cover up the color...