Learn to draw - every free step-by-step lesson

Where to start if you have never drawn before

Draw the fish first. It is one oval and two triangles, it takes about seven minutes, and its real job is to get you to the end of something - because the usual reason people stop drawing is not a bad picture, it is a folder of pictures that never got finished.

Then draw the cat, which adds the one habit everything else depends on: block in the big shape, put a centre line through it, and hang the features off that instead of placing them by eye. After that the heart, which is where you learn that symmetry is measured rather than felt.

Three lessons, under half an hour in total, and you will have three finished drawings and the two habits that carry into every other subject on this site.

How to draw a fish · How to draw a cat · How to draw a heart · Or follow Level 1 in order

How these lessons differ from the ten-picture kind

The standard how-to-draw page is ten pictures with a caption each. Step four shows a shape that was not there in step three, and if yours came out differently there is nothing on the page that tells you why. That format is cheap to produce at scale, which is why there are thousands of those pages and why most of them are the same page.

Every step here carries four things instead of one: what to do, why and what to watch while doing it, the specific mistake that step usually causes, and something you can actually check before moving on. A checkpoint such as being able to fit one more eye into the gap is useful to a beginner in a way that asking whether it looks right never is, because a beginner cannot yet tell.

The canvas is on the lesson page itself rather than behind a button, the step outline appears underneath your own strokes as a guide you can turn off, and every lesson has a finish-early button that gives you a complete drawing in fewer steps rather than an abandoned one. When you finish, the drawing can be measured on five specific technical dimensions - and where a dimension cannot be measured, nothing is shown rather than a zero.

Would you rather follow an order?

This page is the whole library with no opinion about sequence, which is right if you already know what you want to draw. If you would rather be told what comes next, the same lessons are arranged into three levels with a stated outcome each.

All three free drawing courses · Level 1, for people who have not drawn since school · Level 2, for drawings that come out flat · Level 3, for outlines that are fine but not solid

Or teach one yourself

Anything you can draw, you can turn into a lesson: the builder walks you through it one step at a time on the same canvas every lesson here uses, and you end up with a private page anyone can draw along with.

The best ones can join this library - a human editor reviews every submission, builds accepted ones out with the site's full step apparatus, credits you, and holds them to the same quality gate as our own writing.

Make your own lesson

Want to draw something we have not drawn yet?

The library will never contain your dog, your shoes or your own face, so there is a tool that builds a step-by-step tutorial from a photograph you upload - broken into shapes of light and dark, biggest first, which is the order a person would actually draw it in.

If you would rather just draw, the blank canvas is one click away, and there is a new prompt every day for the days when deciding what to draw is the thing stopping you.

Make a tutorial from a photo · Draw online on a blank canvas · Today's drawing prompt