Level 1: Start Here

Who this level is for

People who think they cannot draw. That is the whole audience, and it is a much larger group than people who cannot draw - most of the difference is that nobody ever showed them that a drawing is built rather than produced.

You are in the right place if your last drawing was at school, if you have opened a sketchbook and closed it again, or if you can copy something reasonably well but have no idea what to do when there is nothing to copy. None of the lessons here assume any equipment or any prior attempt.

Skip to Level 2 if you already finish drawings and your complaint about them is that they look flat. This level's real subject is finishing things, not accuracy, so somebody who already finishes will find it slow - and being told to skip a level is more useful than being flattered into staying.

What each lesson trains

The fish is about overlap: the fins cross the body outline rather than sitting beside it, and that single line is the cheapest depth cue in drawing. The cat adds the centre line, which is how features get placed by measurement instead of by eye - the habit that everything later depends on.

The house is about closure. Corners meeting is the most visible marker of care in a drawing and it is entirely mechanical: overshoot rather than aim. The heart and the butterfly are both symmetry, which cannot be felt and has to be checked at named points.

The ice cream cone is stacking - shapes sitting on and in front of each other - and it smuggles in the idea that lines drawn on a curved surface must curve, which is most of drawing patterns on anything.

Two drills pair directly with this level. Line control makes every one of these lessons easier and it is the fastest-moving skill on the site; the shapes drill fixes the corners that the house lesson keeps complaining about.

Straight line drills · Shape and box drills

How to work through it

One lesson a day, in order, and stop when it is done. Six days, about an hour of drawing in total, and you will have six finished drawings - which is six more than most people who decide to learn to draw ever produce.

When a lesson goes badly, move on. That is a definite recommendation rather than a shrug: at this level the thing being trained is finishing, and redoing a lesson until it is good trains the opposite. Press the finish-early button, look at the complete drawing you made, and start the next one tomorrow.

Redoing has its place later, once you can tell what specifically went wrong. Redoing a drawing you cannot diagnose just produces a second copy of the same mistake with more resentment attached.

Do not buy anything. A pencil and the back of an envelope is genuinely enough for all six lessons, and the impulse to acquire equipment before starting is one of the more reliable ways of not starting.

What gets measured as you go

Nothing is graded and nothing blocks you, but any drawing you finish here can be measured if you want it to be. Five technical dimensions: line confidence, proportion, placement, whether your shapes close, and how much tonal range you used.

At this level, expect line confidence and closure to be the two that move. Proportion and value barely change in a first week and that is normal - they are months-long skills, and a tool that pretended otherwise would be lying to you in week one.

Where something cannot be measured - a mouse reports no pressure - nothing is shown for it rather than a zero.

How the measurement works