Drawing prompts: things to draw when you are stuck

How to pick one

Pick the one you could start in thirty seconds, not the one you would be proudest of finishing. Those are almost never the same prompt, and choosing the second is how an evening turns into twenty minutes of scrolling and no drawing.

If two look equally appealing, take the one you can see from where you are sitting. Drawing from life is more useful than drawing from memory at every skill level, and the difference is largest for beginners - your memory of a shoe is a symbol, and the shoe on the floor is not.

And do not save the good prompt for when you are better. You will draw it badly now and badly in a year, and the version you draw now is the one you will be able to compare against.

Easy things to draw when you are stuck

Everything here is built from shapes you can already make, and none of it takes more than about ten minutes.

• A fish - one oval and two triangles
• A heart, and get both halves to match
• A house with the windows lined up
• An ice cream cone, two scoops, overlapping
• A butterfly with matching wings
• A five-pointed star, freehand, without lifting the pen
• A cloud - harder than it looks, because there is no outline
• A key from your own pocket
• One leaf, with its veins
• A balloon, and the string it is tied to
• An envelope, sealed, seen at an angle
• A ladder leaning against a wall
• An open umbrella from underneath
• A paperclip, actual size
• A lightbulb, including the glass

Animals

Animals are the most-requested subject there is, and the trick with all of them is the same: build the skull and the body separately, then overlap them.

• A cat, sitting
• A dog - and a specific breed, not a generic one
• A fox, all triangles
• A bird on a wire, seen from below
• A snail, because the shell is a spiral you can practise
• An owl - two circles and a beak
• A horse's head only, which is the hard half
• A rabbit with its ears down
• A frog sitting, seen from the front
• A beetle from directly above
• Your own pet, from a photo on your phone

Faces and people

Draw the parts before the whole. An eye on its own teaches construction, proportion, value and edge control at once, and it is small enough to draw four times in an evening.

• One eye, close up
• A mouth, from a photo
• A nose in three-quarter view
• A whole face, front on
• Your own non-drawing hand
• An ear, which nobody can draw from memory
• Your own face in a mirror, ten minutes, no erasing
• A person seen from behind, so you cannot cheat with a face
• Two hands holding something

Things on your desk right now

The best subject is the one already in front of you, because drawing from life removes the single largest source of error - your memory's opinion about what the object looks like.

• Your mug, with the handle turned away
• An open book, both pages
• An apple, shaded properly
• A pair of scissors, open
• Your glasses, folded
• Your phone, face down, at an angle
• Headphones, tangled
• A bottle, half full, with the light behind it
• Your own shoes, worn, exactly as they are lying
• A crumpled piece of paper - the best value exercise there is

Outside

Landscapes are where drawing stops being about copying and starts being about deciding what to leave out. Every one of these is really a lesson in restraint.

• A tree - clumps of foliage, not leaves
• A rose, built from the centre out
• The view out of your window, in ten minutes
• A roofline against the sky, nothing else
• A park bench, empty
• A bicycle - the hardest common object there is
• A puddle with a reflection in it
• A fence going away from you, for the perspective

From memory

These are deliberately hard and the point is not the drawing. Drawing from memory shows you exactly which parts of an object you have never actually looked at, which is information you cannot get any other way.

• A bicycle from memory, then look one up and compare
• A hand from memory, then draw your own beside it
• The house you grew up in
• A map of your walk to work
• A room you have not been in for ten years
• A face you know well, without a photo

Two-minute prompts

For a day when you have no time and no appetite. Two minutes of drawing is categorically different from none, and that is the entire argument for this section.

• The shape of the shadow under something, not the object
• The gap between two objects, as a shape in its own right
• Your own hand, one continuous line, without lifting the pen
• Anything at all, without looking at the paper once
• Five ellipses at five different angles
• One box, drawn through, corners crossed

Prompts that are really exercises

Some of the prompts above are drills wearing a subject as a disguise. If you want the drill directly - with a timer, a reference and a score at the end - each of the five is a page of its own.

Do one for five minutes before you start on a prompt. It is the cheapest improvement available on this whole site.

Straight line drills · Ellipse drills · Boxes and basic shapes · Proportion drills · Value scale exercises

Today's prompt

If a list of eighty things is itself the problem - and for a lot of people it is - there is one prompt a day on a page of its own, chosen for you, with the lesson attached wherever one exists.

Today's drawing prompt