However, when copying others’ pictures you should know it’s no good way to develop your drawing skills. Instead you better prefer drawing reality. You can do your first steps easier when drawing only scenes containing simple objects and start drawing more complicated things like animals and people later. But always try to draw real scenes! Unfortunately this is only one of a number of obstacles on your way to learning how to draw beautiful and skillfully crafted pictures. Especially when you want to become more creative read on to learn about the important stations on your way to drawing mastery

Your most important prerequisite for learning to draw isn’t some special equipment or material, but your very own motivation. Especially in the beginning you may face setbacks. Also you‘ll probably fear failure. But the more enthusiastic and motivated you are, the easier you can rush over any obstacles and move constantly along the road to success. Another important thing is to understand your subject. The better you understand what you want to depict, the better you’ll it to paper. Once you learned to recognize and understand your subject’s dimensions and the objects that are composing the scene, reproducing them in the proper proportions, dimensions and perspective will become much easier.

Then, drawing to some extent is just “craftsmanship”. Some of the old masters even had a host of sidekicks who did all this “mechanical” work. As you want to do your drawings yourself, you need to practice these basic techniques. You need to learn how to get your lines and shapes in form, create smooth shadings, etc. The old masters needed their sub workers, so they could focus on the creative part, the whole picture. And so you need a good foundation of these skills, to have more creativity and fun.