Why do I suck at drawing?

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Before we start. No one really sucks at drawing and you shouldn´t be too harsh on yourself. I understand the frustration, that you want to draw an awesome thing and midway through you realize it just won’t come out the way, you imagined it to be. The secret is, it never does come out the way you imagined it. But don´t give up because as long as you don´t give up on drawing you are going to learn how to draw. I strongly believe that everyone can learn how to draw!

“Why do I suck at drawing” is a question I hear people asking themselves a lot. And the short and kinda direct answer to this question is: “Because you either don´t exercise or you don´t exercise correctly and therefore you don´t get better at drawing.” Also, drawing takes a lot of time to learn and you never truly master it. All the artists we call master (or at least the ones I met) will never think of themselves as masters and always tell you, that they are still learning and that there still is a lot they don´t know. And here is the more in-depth answer to the question: “why do I suck at drawing?”

The First Reason why you suck at drawing:

If you never really studied drawing before and you have no real concept of the art of creating the illusion of a three-dimensional object on a two-dimensional drawing surface, then you shouldn’t be surprised why your drawings look off. I personally have been drawing for 8 years now and I didn´t really get any better the first 3 years, because all I did was blindly copying objects or pictures I liked. So I got good at copying but I never could render the object quite well enough and I never could draw thinks from my Imagination. I only started to get better at drawing, when I started to learn the fundamentals and If you ask 100 artists what the number one important thing to learn is when you want to start drawing, at least 95 will answer with “learn the fundamentals!”

Learn the Fundamentals of Drawing! That’s the second reason why your drawings suck!

The fundamentals of drawing are the most importand things to learn when you start out. Because, like the name suggests, they are the fundamentals and everything builds on top of them. So what are the fundamentals of drawing?

  • Perspective
  • Anatomy
  • Shape and form
  • Light and composition
  • Color theory and how colors work in general

These, in no particuar order, are the most importand fundamentals, that you have to learn. You will never truly master any of these fundamentals as you will continue to find more things to learn about them but you will need to have a good understanding in these fundamentals to be able to draw well. But you surely know some people who can draw very good but never heard of any of theese fundamentals, right? Well they are probably very talented but that is actually a disatvantage!

Don´t get discouraged, because you know someone who is talented. Talent is a disadvantage!

We all probably know someone, who is very talented in something and maybe you know someone, who is talented in drawing. Well, talent is not a necessity to learn drawing but it makes it easier to a certain point. When someone is talented in drawing, they will subconsciously be able to make observations and learn how to draw quite fast but they will also hit a brick wall at a certain point.

For example, this talented person is very good at drawing the human figure and he can draw the figure in a lot of poses from his memory but he never learned anatomy or perspective so he will never be able to draw the human figure in any way he desires. His talent lead him to learn very easily but he will probably never try to actively sit down and learn something because he is not used to it. So a talentet person will hardly improve beyond a certain point while someone who is not that talented but passionate about drawing will progress and learn beyond that and so many more points. Because a passionate person will be used to learning about the subject that he or she likes. So be that passionate person, don´t give up on drawing and eventually you will surpass every talented person you know!

The most important thing is to never give up on drawing!

Learning how to draw can be very hard and discouraging for so many reasons but if you really want to learn how to draw and I only had one thing, that I could tell you, then I would tell you to never give up on it!

You learning progress will feel slow and you sometimes will have the feeling as if you are not improving at all but as long as you dont stop to learn then you will never truly stop Improving. I guarantee you, you will learn how to draw as long as you don´t stop. So keep on drawing and have fun with it!

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