There are times when you haven’t drawn in a long time, and finally, you have the time, energy, and means to do it, but you’re blank. You have no idea what to draw, and it only frustrates you.
Drawing brings immense benefits to your brain: It can help relieve stress, strengthen your problem-solving skills, and improve your daily performance.
The whole point of drawing is that you can have fun and enjoy some time with your sketchbook, so here are some drawing ideas to get you started whenever you’re blocked.
Real-life landscapes
- Your favorite view from the place you live.
- The view from your window.
- A place you’ve traveled to (or would like to travel to).
- The most important place from where you live.
- Go to google maps, go to a random place and draw it.
- Your childhood neighborhood (If it's the same place you live now, draw how it looked back then).
- Any place, but as if you were looking at it from a fish-eyed lens.
- One of the Seven Wonders of the Modern World.
- One of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World.
- One of the underwater museums around the world.
Fantasy landscapes
- A medieval town.
- A futuristic city.
- A place from your favorite fantasy or science fiction movie.
- The craziest amusement park you could imagine.
- A place in the clouds.
- A place that appeared in your dreams (or somebody else’s).
- A city in the sun.
- A place you love… from an alternate universe.
- Draw how your neighborhood would look if magic was a common thing.
- Choose any of the ideas before, but make it post-apocalyptic.
To expand your imagination and creativity skills
- Find a word you don’t know in a dictionary and draw what you think they mean before reading the answer.
- Invent some words and draw what you think they might be.
- Fill some bags with nouns, verbs, connectors, and so on. Then, build a phrase with the words you take from them and draw whatever you get.
- Take 2+ animals and combine them into one single creature.
- Pick a feeling or any other intangible concept and draw what it looks like.
- Draw 20 circles with enough space between each other. Turn each into something different.
- Do the same drawing but in different art styles.
- Create an OC, and then draw the opposite of that OC.
- Try to create an optical illusion.
- Find an illustration and change anything you would have done differently if it was yours.
Still life
- An item in a room where it doesn’t belong. E.g., A cooking pot in a bedroom or a pool in the kitchen.
- An old item that you own.
- An object with strong meaning to you: Your lucky shirt or childhood blanket can be good examples.
- Your favorite dish.
- Dirty laundry.
- Your room before and after cleaning it.
- The most interesting thing you own.
- A Halloween-themed item.
- A Christmas-themed item (or any other holiday-themed item).
- Your favorite outfit hanging from a clothes hanger.
People and anatomy
- Look up some choreographies on YouTube for any dancing style you want, pause it, and draw the frame you got.
- Do a study for an uncommon part of the body to draw, like the elbow or the back of the neck.
- Draw a person in the most uncomfortable but possible position you could think of.
- Draw the same person expressing different emotions.
- Now, do the same emotion, but expressed by people with oddly different characteristics.
- How someone would look as a child, an adult, and an old person.
- Draw a person based on an inanimate object or an animal.
- Look for pole dancing or gymnastics videos and do the same as you did with the choreography.
- Try re-drawing the dancer or the gymnast with a different body type. Always have in mind how physics would affect this new body.
- Draw someone interesting you found on the street.
To practice detail
- Draw anything you want, and take your time to perceive how a different color palette changes your drawing.
- Draw something in black and white and play around with the lights and shadows.
- Draw a coin or a bill and do it as accurately as possible.
- Take the most boring thing in your house and pay attention to all its details. For example, the material it is made of, whether it has an imperfection, and so on.
- Create a drawing that includes water: How does a pencil look if you put it in a half-full glass of water? How do the waves of an ocean behave? What happens to a puddle when raindrops fall in it?
- Draw people with particular characteristics in their body: analyze how stretch marks work, how hard work can change somebody’s hands, how freckles look in old people, and all the singularities different types of bodies could have.
- Draw damaged things as accurately as possible.
- Draw a landscape in an unusual perspective, like a forest, but as if you were lying on the ground.
- Pick an animal and make it look young adult and mid-age. As if there were an age difference, but not as extreme as childhood from old age.
- Play around with the proportions of an object or a body and see how slightly changing them affects their perception and how it should be drawn.
How to improve your drawing skills?
Discipline: Make drawing a daily habit. It doesn’t matter if you do it only for 10 minutes daily. Practicing daily is key to improvement.
Find references: Thanks to the internet, we can now find countless artists to have as references. How they use light, whether they do line art or not.
The best thing is that some stream or record themselves while drawing and then post it, allowing you to see their workflow, what they prioritize and why they do it.
Explore: Give yourself a chance to try new things when drawing. For example, if you only draw people, take a day to draw a place. Try to imitate someone’s style and learn from it, or use different materials in your next drawing.
Being always curious and playing around with the resources and information you can find anywhere will abroad you possibilities when creating a new illustration.
If you wonder how pixel art is done, or you want to explore some resources to draw digitally, you can find the perfect courses here at Skillademia. You can become a pro using Procreate or creating pixel art illustrations right now!
