Best Online Drawing Classes For Beginners
Drawing is a great way to express yourself, convey a story and create art.
And the discovery of cave drawings that are over 64,000 years old shows that humans have been doing it for quite a while now.
Even most children nowadays learn to express themselves by drawing before they even know how to write.
However, that doesn’t mean drawing is easy.
Especially as you grow older and become more critical of your own work, your internal critic might convince you to just give up.
Fortunately, everyone can learn how to draw and improve their skills with the right guidance.
We have compiled a list of online drawing classes you can take at home to help improve your self-confidence and skills.
The Art And Science of Drawing
Drawing and sketching are considered to be a form of art. But if you want to improve your skills it might be best to study the science behind it.
This online drawing course will teach you all the essential drawing skills and the best way to practice.
Each lesson is filled with clear and step-by-step instructions that will give you a deeper understanding of the drawing process.
You will learn many tools and techniques that you normally have to pay a high price for at a private art academy.
Some of the basic skills that you will learn include how to analyze forms, how to build a drawing layer upon layer, volumetric drawing and applying light and shadow.
This class will take you from absolute basics to advanced techniques. So it will be a great choice for complete beginners but also people with some experience that want to learn more.
All you need to get started are the right sketching supplies!
Course includes: 1.5 h of video, certificate of completion
Level: beginner and intermediate
The Complete Beginners Drawing And Shading Course
One of the most difficult things when drawing is to make it look 3-dimensional and come to life.
When it comes to this course, I’m not sure if it is the ultimate guide to learning how to draw. But it does a great job at teaching how to apply shading to your drawings.
You will develop a deeper understanding of the theory of light and shadow, learn several shading techniques to create the illusion of depth and form, and get to know how to use perspective to your advantage.
This course will teach you 6 different pencil techniques (soft shading, broad stroke, chisel point, fine lines, hatching, cross-hatching) and 3 different ways of shading (hard edge, soft edge, gradation).
After learning all of these crucial theories and techniques, you will be able to put them practice all of them in a final project in which you will get to draw a child portrait.
Course includes: 10.5 h of video, 31 articles, 33 supplemental resources, certificate of completion
Level: beginner
Drawing From Photographs
One of the biggest mistakes that beginners make is to think that you have to make a drawing completely from scratch.
This is incredibly hard and requires years of practice.
For example, you probably know what a dog looks like well enough to recognize one if you see one. But is that enough to draw a realistic looking dog on paper?
Probably not.
That’s why many artists, including professionals, use reference photos to make their art look better.
In this online drawing course, you will learn how to improve your drawings by using photos as references.
You will go through the entire process of choosing the right image, mapping out a framework, and how to apply shading.
This course is for anyone that wants to improve their drawing skills and is especially useful for beginners. You don’t need any previous experience since every lecture uses ideas and concepts from the previous one.
Course includes: 1.5 h of video, 1 supplemental resource, certificate of completion
Level: beginner
See Better, Draw Better: Exercises for Beginners
Have you ever been disappointed by the difference between what you were trying to draw and the final drawing you made?
This is probably because you are drawing what you think you see, rather than drawing what is actually there.
Seeing is the key to successful drawing. And seeing better will improve your drawings too!
In this course, you will learn work on your drawing skills through a variety of different exercises.
These exercises will help you improve your eye/hand coordination, learn how to apply shading and how to effectively use light/dark contrast, and you’ll get to make tonal drawings and realistic drawings.
Course includes: 2.3 h of video
Level: beginner
Colored Pencils Essential Techniques
If black and white become a little repetitive, feel free to include all the colors of the rainbow into your drawings using colored pencils.
Working with colored pencils might take you back to your childhood.
But getting good results with colored pencils is actually even more challenging than regular graphite pencils.
On top of the drawing basics such as shading and eye-hand coordination, you will also need to know how to incorporate the colors.
In this online drawing course, you will learn how to use color theory to your advantage and bring your drawings alive.
Some of the topics include color layering, the interplay between color and texture, and underpainting.
You will get to practice what you have learned by drawing one still life of cherries and another one of beautiful flowers.
After taking all the lessons, you will have the necessary skills to color almost anything you want.
Course includes: 2.4 h of video
Level: intermediate
