8 Easy Drawing Ideas To Kickstart Your Art Habit

This video is sponsored by Imprint. Today I've collected eight simple beginner-friendly drawing ideas to help you overcome self-doubt and finally kickstart your art habit by removing the stress of what to draw and even better you can sketch them in 30 minutes or less on your lunch break or after dinner. Before I built an art habit I thought that to call myself an artist I needed to spend lots of time drawing every day, have great technical skill and be really confident but actually it's a lot simpler than that. Really you just need to give yourself permission to start from scratch and allow yourself to be a beginner so that you can enjoy drawing regularly because getting started is the key and learning as you go is what truly matters. Don't worry if you don't know how to draw these are just some casual ideas for you to experiment and have fun with because the most important thing is that you're excited to show up for yourself and your art time. If you need a bit of help you can always look up reference photos for these drawing ideas or I have some step-by-step tutorials for most of them over on my Patreon where I've also shared the full hour and a half real-time drawing session of doing these prompts without talking so we can just sit and draw together. So grab your art supplies of choice and some paper or a sketchbook and let's start drawing. Drawing idea number one is rainbows. Rainbows are the perfect beginner art doodle because they are probably the easiest thing you could ever find to draw plus they're joyful and they're a great way to experiment with colour. You really just need three or more curves together in different colours and you've got a rainbow so even if you doubt yourself as an artist then I know that you can absolutely draw a beautiful rainbow today. It's fun to try different colours together and they don't have to be next to each other in the colour wheel like a traditional rainbow. You can try totally unexpected colours together and see what looks good to you. You can also add some other weather elements like sunshine or clouds. This is your sketchbook so use these drawing ideas as prompts but don't feel like you need to stick to them literally. They're just there for inspiration so feel free to go totally off script and follow that inspiration wherever it takes you. Just putting pencil to paper is sometimes the hardest part of building an art habit because our brains give us so much hesitation and resistance and put so many questions in our way. You might sit down to draw and think but what am I drawing? I don't know how to draw anything. I don't have the right tools. What if it doesn't look good? But if you can just start drawing something, anything, then you've won the hardest battle and proven to yourself that you can build an art habit because you're sitting and drawing right now. Drawing idea number two is flowers. I love drawing flowers because they're easy, there's so much variety and they're colourful. I'm going to be filling my page with them but don't feel like you need to do the same. Just sitting and drawing one flower is still telling your brain that you're someone who spends time on their art every day even if it's just a doodle and a simple sketch and that's really powerful when you're trying to build a habit. You can just enjoy drawing the same flower shape if you like but maybe in different colours or you can experiment with totally different shapes. If you go to google images and search for something like types of flower then it'll show you lots of charts of different flower shapes and that can be really helpful to reference. I've personally never had a bad time drawing flowers and it's okay if the idea of drawing flowers is not very original. You don't need to be innovative every time that you draw. Idea number three is bugs. Bugs are great if you want to get into drawing some characters because they're the easiest living thing to draw. They're made of easy shapes, they have simple faces, they don't have arms or hands to deal with and they're cute. My favourites to draw are ladybugs, bees, snails and worms because they can make for really fun characters. You can easily give them a bit of extra personality and story by giving them accessories or human clothes even if it doesn't make much sense that a snail would be wearing a scarf. Idea number four is to draw leaves. When you're in the mood for some mindless doodling leaves are the way to go. They come in lots of shapes and sizes but they're flat shapes so that makes them super simple to draw. Because they're so simple they're great for practicing your line work or trying out different styles or mediums without having much at stake. And just like with the flowers you can google different leaf shapes to get lots of great references to use. And you can choose the season with the colours that you use. So using really warm vibrant greens suggest spring, deeper greens suggest summer and then oranges and yellows suggest autumn. And maybe it's nice to add a few flowers or berries in the mix too if you get tired of drawing leaf shapes. So that's already four easy things you can draw so that you don't get stuck with creative block when you sit down at your sketchbook. And although they might not be the grand ideas you have in mind for your art just being in the habit of doodling something every day is going to really help you build up to those bigger projects. I think we tell ourselves that to build a meaningful habit we have to do lots of research, get ourselves set up perfectly, choose a day to start and then put loads of energy into it from day one. But actually there's a lot of power in picking up a pencil today and just quietly starting an art habit without any fanfare in just whatever time you have available. I've been trying to spend a few minutes a day learning about something that will help me achieve my goals and at the moment I'm enjoying using imprint who are the sponsor of today's video to take bite-sized lessons on topics like productivity and business. They have lots of courses on really practical topics broken down into small manageable lessons with lots of great illustrations to make the and because the lessons only take a few minutes it helps build a habit because I can do one with a cup of tea in the morning. I'm currently doing a course called be more productive to get some ideas on how I can use my time more effectively especially because I work for myself so that I can get things done and then have more time for the fun things. Imprint also has book summaries on some really popular books like atomic habits if you've been meaning to give them a read but haven't yet been able to find the time. You can try everything imprint has to offer for free for seven days by scanning my QR code on screen or clicking on the link in the description and as viewers of my channel you also get 20% off imprint's annual premium subscription so definitely take a look for yourself if you're wanting to build positive learning habits. So we still have four more quick and easy drawing ideas and number five is animal faces. Faces might feel a bit daunting if you're a beginner but I think animal faces are a lot more forgiving than human faces and if you're not ready to tackle drawing whole bodies then this is a great place to start. Some simple animal faces to draw are bears, bunnies, mice, cats and dogs. All of those animals have quite round faces and then either a round nose or a v-shaped nose and then just different shaped ears depending on the animal. Really the ear shape is the most iconic feature for a lot of animals so as long as you can get that right then you can make the face a little bit weird and still totally get away with it. If you are a member of my patreon community then definitely check out my simple guide to drawing animal faces to give you a little bit of guidance if you need it. Idea number six is human faces. This one might feel a bit scary but try to remove any expectation that you're going to draw a realistic human face and enjoy experimenting with doodles of faces with different expressions because that can be really fun. You can try drawing different round shapes on your page and then building on features from there. Try different nose shapes, make their ears a bit bigger or smaller, give them a cool hairstyle or maybe a hat. For this I kind of like to think of the different characters in the game Guess Who and all of the defining features that they have like a big nose or glasses or curly hair. You definitely don't need good technical drawing skills to enjoy drawing human characters and giving them lots of personality and if you're really not sure then you can always draw them on a scrap bit of paper so that there's really no pressure. And of course you don't have to draw as many as this if you don't have the time, just draw one if that's all you can manage today. It's still valuable to spend any amount of time on your art. Number seven is your favorite food. When you don't want to come up with a new idea or design a character just think about your favorite foods and draw them. I personally quite like drawing biscuits and cakes because that's my favorite thing to eat and they're simple shapes to draw too. And you can use a reference if you want to which is just kind of a good excuse to have some of your favorite food because technically then it's for research. See if you can simplify it down to its most basic shapes and lines to keep things fun and simple or you can do a full still life if you have the time and the energy. And the last drawing idea for today is your favorite hobby. If you're feeling adventurous then you can draw an activity that you love or even just the tools you use to do it. This is great if you love doing crafts because you can just doodle elements of your favorite things to make or if you love baking then you could draw some stages of a recipe or maybe the ingredients. It's just a simple way to come up with things to draw because you're familiar with your hobbies so it doesn't require any grand ideas and it's just useful to have as practice for drawing interesting shapes. Admittedly if you have a fiddly hobby like painting intricate model figurines or making big things out of lego then this might actually be a hard thing to draw and not so simple so maybe just start with drawing an easy hobby. For any of these prompts you can just spend whatever time you have available today just sketching out some shapes or line work. You don't have to finish anything or make anything that's perfect plus you can always add to it tomorrow. Focusing in the beginning on drawing things that take less than half an hour is a really great way to help build an art habit that's achievable when you're busy and if it's achievable then you're more likely to be consistent with it. If you have more than half an hour available then even better but try not to put too much pressure on spending loads of time making art every day. Even just 15 minutes four days of the week is a whole hour. 20 minutes six days of the week is two whole hours. I bet if you had two hours free one afternoon you'd probably think it was a decent amount of time to spend on something but it's still valuable even if it's split up because you can achieve big things in small steps. If you're learning to draw then consider joining me on Patreon where I host an illustration club every month that you can use for inspiration and accountability. I also have lots of video art tutorials on art basics like color palettes and composition and step-by-step guides to teach you how to draw things that you can get instant access to when you join. If you enjoyed this video then I think you'll really enjoy this other video about building a daily art habit in just 20 minutes a day so just click on the thumbnail on screen to pop it on. I love being able to share these videos with you. I appreciate you all so much and I'll see you in the next one. Bye bye!