A quick beginner’s guide to drawing

6 drawing exercises to get you started right now
[image error]Ralph Ammer provides a quick sketch to get you started.

Ever wish you could draw? Not become an illustrator, but add a doodle to your prose or poem like Kurt Vonnegut in Breakfast of Champions. Or, if you really want to get literary, like Laurence Sterne in Tristram Shandy?1 Drawing isn’t hard. I learned to do it, and if I practiced, I might be good at it.

The good news? You don’t have to be good to draw.

 

Ralph Ammer provides one of the best quick start guides to drawing I’ve seen recently. Grab your pencil (or the digital tablet and stylus you bought but never used), and check it out.

1You haven’t read Tristram Shandy? Forget Joyce’s Ulysses, this is a book every writer should read to expand their sense of what a writer can do. Originally published in sections, the eighteenth-century version of blog posts, Sterne pulls your leg, plays with coincidence, and makes illustration a part of the story. No, it’s not the easist read in the world. Rise to the challenge. back