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I want to learn to draw on my iPad
I have recently found myself wanting to learn to draw. I have very minimal visual arts skills, and feel much more comfortable with a musical instrument than a sketchbook. I would like to change that, not to become some exceptional artist or anything, but because I like the idea of being able to just sketch and draw and doodle in my spare time.
I have an iPad, Apple Pencil, and ProCreate, but I don't really know where to begin. I would be most likely learning to use ProCreate at the same time as learning to draw, although I don't know if that's a bad idea or not.
Are there books, online courses, YouTube videos that you would recommend for a complete beginner?
There's a lot of resources. Infamously, the meme is that no tutorial ever covers intermediate art - just beginner art.
I think the main thing is that there is no best way to draw, or best way to learn to draw. I'd recommend just perusing everything, take what works for you, don't sweat too much what doesn't.
You've already seen two major beginner "courses" - drawabox and Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain. They come from different, but equally valid, viewpoints for how beginners should learn. Drawabox takes a constructionist approach, right side takes an observationalist approach. Both are necessary skills, eventually.
I would say that drawabox has two main flaws; one, it's boring, which is a problem for self-teaching. Second, around the lesson where you learn textures, the difficulty really jumps. Right side just doesn't have much bite, imo. It really spends most of the time trying to get you to be better at observing and getting out of symbolic drawing and that's useful, but I do feel like by the end of the book you're not actually learned to draw anything on your own.
In some sense they cover each other's weaknesses.
But I would also content that it's not necessary to strictly follow any course. As a self-learner, what you should do is find what you really want to draw, even if it's hard, and just keep trying it. Watch endless tutorials on youtube. For 90% of people, what they want to draw is... people. But they keep psyching themselves out and spent their time drawing 250 boxes and get burnt out. Just draw humans. That's what'll keep you interested, and therefore that's what's best.
I will say if you ever get to the point where you're ready to jump to painting, not drawing, Sinix's two part tutorial here and here is the GOAT for really challenging how you need to approach painting on a fundamental level.
This is really very good advice. When I first started learning to play the guitar, this is what I did. I didn't bother with a course, I just started trying to play songs I liked. I think it let me advance a lot more quickly than a structured course. Somehow, 20 years on from that beginning, I seem to have forgotten that "just fucking do it" is the often best way to learn a new hobby. Thanks for the reminder!
Off-topic musings about the semantics of the title
I struggled to sum this one up very succinctly. For me the existing title suggest that I can already draw, but not on an iPad, and want to transfer those skills. But I want to learn to draw _and_ learn to draw on my iPad. Idk, I'm definitely overthinking this, but I'm still failing to come up with an adequate title!In terms of "learning procreate", the main thing I'd recommend is to keep it simple. Personally I'm not a big fan of procreate's default brushes. IMO I would make modified versions of the basic round brush, and use that for everything (this will work even professionally - many professional digital illustrators only ever use the round brush with opacity pressure control).
Take the basic round brush. Increase the smoothing, add a taper. That's your sketch brush.
Remove the opacity jitter, add a slight bit of size jitter, remove the taper. That's an inking brush (if you want to ink).
Just the default normal round brush with no changes is perfectly fine for painting.
Other than that, procreate is fairly intuitive.
I liked “drawing on the right side of the brain “ when I started learning it last year. It’s about general drawing and the advice is for pen&papee, but I think most principles work on an iPad too.
There’s also proko on YouTube. And for procreate specific: https://youtu.be/tKcbQEx4syk Art with Flo
I would avoid drawabox unless you love grinding the same thing over and over
There used to be a subreddit called ArtFundimentals that was pretty active, and the creator eventually created a site for the exercises. It had been closed due to disagreements with the management, but I guess they literally just opened the sub back up because the owner is worried that otherwise reddit would step in to take it away.
TL;DR: Don't be afraid of a pencil or wasting paper. There are lots of ways to start, but check out Drawbox. [I think are at least several free lessons there, and they come with video if that's more your style.]
In general, I think there are lots of exercises to get you familiar with shape and form; familiar with breaking things down into simple shapes; to build muscle memory; etc. Depending on what you want to be able to draw, you may want to look into specific things like figure drawing and anatomy.
I got a lot out of Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain by Betty Edwards. If you tend toward a pretty analytical way of dealing with stuff that book might hit just right. It's more than doing the exercises (they're good exercises), the way the book discusses concepts in art helps to quickly see things in a bit of a different way, and tune down the part of the mind that hones in on "correctness". It did a good job getting me to be less critical of my own work, which made a flow state much easier to achieve and the results from that were basically, exactly what I'd hoped for. I didn't use an iPad but I did use a paper tablet (a Remarkable), I don't think it matters a whole lot as long as you're sticking to the spirit of the exercises.
It doesn't take much time to see a difference, and the book is floating around for free - imo it's worth seeking out because it's an easy one to check out.
A couple of years ago, I was where you are. My partner is an artist who has a formal art education, which can be at times good and at times pretty unhelpful. On the good side, he has some really good books and is very supportive. On the unhelpful side, he's pretty unimpressed by my drawings.
What helped me the most to learn procreate was Bardot brush on YouTube. She also has a "make art everyday" philosophy that I like a lot. You get better with practice, taking even a few minutes to work on it every day is an easy way to gradually improve, even without following any kind of tutorials.
I really like the approach of "how to think when you draw" by the etherington brothers. They have a lot of quick guides showing how to illustrate lots of different things.
Try lots of stuff, pay attention to what piques your curiosity and interest, and follow those. Have fun!!