This is a beginner practice guide for fundamentals I wrote up a year ago. It's focused on figurative and life drawing but again, these are foundational skills that will help with everything else. Doing any part of it will be useful.

There are three fundamental exercises I recommend: Still life, contour drawing, and gesture drawing.

Still Life

For still life, I mean more specifically value studies of simple objects. Spheres and cubes and the like in real life in front of you. Practice rendering light and dark areas and the transitions between them. Pay special attention to the boundaries and how defined or not they are. This exercise is mostly about understanding how light and shadow fall on a three-dimensional object.

A good exercise might be to spend 5-10 minutes on shading a simple object with a nearby light source that casts a shadow and produces a highlight spot on the object.

The principle of seeing which areas are light and dark and reproducing this on the page is a fundamental element of drawing and will be built on throughout your practice.

Contour drawing

Contour drawing is a specialized exercise intended to develop the connection between the eye and the hand. Whereas our still life exercise is about regions of light and dark, contour drawing is all about tracing the edges of forms. For this exercise, look at an object with complicated contours and reproduced them on the page without looking at the page and as much as possible without lifting the pencil. Go slow. A very good and common reference object is your non-drawing hand. Don't worry if it's difficult or your results look unlike what you were referencing, just do your best to not look at the page while you do the exercise.

Spending 2-5 minutes contouring your hand, maybe two or three times would be a good exercise. Try to notice the physical sensation of making marks on the page as you trace the hand with your eye.

Gesture Drawing

Gesture drawing for our purposes will consist of quick sketches of a figure in a pose. Drawing from life is typically preferable for practice, but for this exercise it is perfectly useful to use photos. Something like sketchdaily can provide a nice library of images. Here we are attempting to capture the most essential elements of a figure and its pose. We will combine the skills developed in contour drawing and still life to reproduce the visual edges of forms and place light and shadow on those forms. This exercise will also help develop more confident strokes and general dexterity with the pencil. It is not important to be perfectly accurate; I would recommend refraining from erasing. Making loose and gestural marks, try to reproduce your reference by working from its larger shapes and areas of contrast (dark against light, for instance).

I would recommend spending ~30 seconds (use a timer!) on an image and do five of them as a beginning exercise. Then do one for teo minutes. As you continue to practice, you might do fewer images and spend longer on them, though not more than five for this particular exercise. The key to this exercise is teaching yourself to quickly understand an image and determine what its constituent parts are in terms of marks on the page.

Although gesture drawing builds on and combined the skills developed in the other two exercises it is not necessary to achieve a particular level of mastery in them to start.

Conclusions

Between value studies in still life, contour drawing, and gesture drawing, we have a great set of exercises for practicing the fundamentals of drawing. There are of course many more things to learn and exercises to supplement your practice, but these are some of the most important to my mind. They're also fun and don't require a lot of time!

It's intentional that all of the exercises I've described are brief. Even fifteen minutes from sitting down to standing up is enough for a productive practice session. If you can try to work in fifteen minutes to half-an-hour of practice several times a week (or most days) you'll likely find yourself improving rapidly and ready to do more involved studies and attempt compositions to challenge yourself very soon.

Most importantly, enjoy yourself and give yourself full permission to draw as you like when you like. There isn't a specific order you need to do things and it's great to attempt a composition that is a little bit beyond you - getting ahead of yourself is a great way to reveal what skills you need to improve and practice them.

Recommendations etc.

I would recommend some of the drawclasses on Drawfee Extra for videos - Marc Brunet has a video with a structured practice schedule focused on gesture drawing. In general search particular questions you have and techniques or exercises you want to practice.

Practicing drawing is kind of like strength training or playing an instrument in that it's very much about consistency and building specific mind-muscle connections. The best way to practice is the way that keeps you doing it. Also similarly, make sure to warm up! Sometimes I'll have days where I feel like I can't draw and all my lines suck until I force myself to just draw a couple of little guys for 15 minutes. The exercises given here are great as warmups throughout your practice drawing.

Have fun!

Thank you!!

I also highly recommend drawing from life for basically anyone...

Yeah that's been a consistent recommendation from everything I've read. I just feel bad when I go to draw someone or something and I make a bad image because I'm not good enough yet, and it's like this weird loop that prevents me from doing it. I probably just have to power through it until I start seeing improvement