My name is Parikshet, I'm 11 years old, and I have been drawing almost every single day since I was about 5. That's six years of drawing — sketchbooks full of doodles, tutorials, attempts, failures, and eventually things I'm genuinely proud of. I'm not a professional artist, I'm a kid just like you — but I've learned a lot through six years of practice, and I want to share the tips that actually made a difference for me.

These aren't just generic tips I found somewhere. These are the specific things I wish someone had told me when I was just starting out. Some of them might seem obvious, but I promise that actually applying them will change how your drawings look and how you feel about drawing.

Why Drawing Tips Actually Matter

Before I share the tips, I want to say something important: natural talent is real, but it's not what makes great artists. I know kids at school who seem to have "natural talent" but barely draw anymore. I also know kids who started with very simple stick figures and, through consistent practice and learning a few techniques, now create absolutely stunning artwork.

The tips in this post are about getting more out of every hour you spend drawing. Think of them as shortcuts — not shortcuts to skip the practice, but shortcuts to make sure your practice is as useful as possible.

Tip 1: Always Start with Light Pencil Marks

This is tip number one for a reason: it's the single change that improved my drawings the most. When I was younger, I pressed really hard with my pencil right from the start. This meant I couldn't erase my mistakes properly — the lines were too deep in the paper. My drawings became messy tangles of dark lines going in all directions.

Now I sketch very lightly for the first 70% of any drawing. I can barely see the lines myself. I get all the shapes and proportions right while I can still erase freely. Only when I'm happy with the shapes do I go over the lines with confident, darker strokes.

Try this: Hold your pencil nearer to the end (not the tip) — this naturally makes you press lighter. It might feel weird at first but it trains you to sketch gently.

Tip 2: Think in Basic Shapes

Every single thing you'll ever want to draw — a dragon, a human face, a car, a tree — is made of circles, ovals, rectangles, triangles, and curved lines. If you try to draw the final, detailed version of something all at once, you'll almost always get the proportions wrong and end up frustrated.

Instead, break your subject down into basic shapes first. A cat's head is a circle. Its body is an oval. Its ears are triangles. Once those basic shapes look right, then you add the details. This technique is called "construction drawing" and it's how professional animators and illustrators work.

Try this: Next time you want to draw something, spend 30 seconds before starting, just looking at it and identifying the basic shapes. "That dog's head is basically a circle. Its body is a bigger oval. Its snout is a smaller oval attached to the circle." Then draw those shapes first.

Tip 3: Draw Every Day — Even Just for 5 Minutes

I can't stress this one enough. Five minutes of drawing every day will improve your skills more than one 2-hour session per week. Drawing is a physical skill, not just an intellectual one. Your hands, eyes, and brain need to build coordination through repetition.

I keep my sketchbook and pencil case on my desk all the time so there's no friction to starting. On really busy days, I might just draw a tiny doodle of a cat or a tree in the margin of my homework notebook. That still counts!

Try this: Set a reminder on a device or ask a parent to remind you to draw something — anything — for 5 minutes before bed each night. After 30 days, look back at your early drawings. You'll be amazed at the progress.

Tip 4: Copy the Things You Love

There's a myth that copying is "cheating" in art. It's absolutely not. Copying the work of artists you admire is one of the oldest and most effective ways to learn. Literally every great artist in history copied from other artists to learn technique.

When you copy a drawing, you're not just reproducing it — you're figuring out how the artist made certain choices. Why did they put the eye there? How did they make that fold in the clothing look real? How did they shade that sphere? You learn by doing, not just by watching.

I have a folder on my tablet of drawings I want to copy someday. Whenever I have free time, I pick one and try to reproduce it. I never publish copied drawings as my own — but the learning from copying shows up in my original work.

Tip 5: Draw From Real Life, Not Just Imagination

Drawing from imagination is fun and important — but if you only ever draw from imagination, you'll eventually hit a wall where your drawings feel "flat" or wrong and you can't figure out why. Drawing from real life solves this.

Look at your hand right now. How many segments are in each finger? How do the knuckles crease when you bend your finger? How does the light fall on the back of your hand? You probably never noticed these things because your brain already "knows" what a hand looks like. But drawing forces you to actually observe, and that observation skill transfers to everything you draw.

I try to draw one real-life object every week — a piece of fruit, my shoe, a plant, my phone. It feels harder than drawing from imagination at first, but it builds observational skills that make all drawing better.

Tip 6: Learn the Rule of Thirds for Composition

Composition is how you arrange things within your drawing. Where do you put the main subject? How much space do you leave around it? These decisions determine whether a drawing looks dynamic and interesting or static and boring.

The rule of thirds is a simple composition guide used by photographers, filmmakers, and artists. Divide your page into a 3x3 grid (like a noughts-and-crosses board). The most visually interesting places to put your main subject are at the four intersections of these grid lines — not dead center.

Dead center placements look a bit flat and symmetrical. Off-center placements create a sense of movement and interest. Try this in your next drawing and notice how much more dynamic it looks.

Tip 7: Study How Shading Works

Shading is what makes a drawing look three-dimensional instead of flat. Without shading, a circle is just a circle. With shading, it becomes a sphere. This is genuinely transformative for the quality of your drawings.

Shading basics: decide where your light source is (usually upper-left or upper-right). The parts of your object facing the light are lighter. The parts away from the light are darker. Objects also cast shadows on the surface they're sitting on — the cast shadow.

Try this: Put an orange or an apple on a table. Look at it carefully. Notice where it's lightest, where it's darkest, and where it casts a shadow on the table. Now try to draw it with shading. This single exercise improved my drawings more than almost anything else.

Tip 8: Don't Outline Everything

When I first started drawing, I outlined every single shape in dark pencil. Every edge got a line. This makes drawings look flat and "cartoonish" in a way that doesn't always serve you.

Professional artists vary their line weights (thickness) to suggest depth and focus. Important edges that face toward the viewer get darker, thicker lines. Background edges and parts that fade away get lighter, thinner lines or sometimes no outline at all — just shading that gradually blends into the paper.

Try making your outlines thicker on one side (usually the bottom and shadow side of objects) and thinner or absent on the light side. This immediately makes drawings look more skilled and professional.

Tip 9: Embrace Mistakes and "Mistakes"

I put "mistakes" in quotes because a lot of what feels like a mistake isn't one. A line that goes slightly wrong might create a texture. A smudge might look like shading. An accidental mark might suggest a shadow that improves the drawing.

The real skill in drawing is learning to respond to what's on the paper rather than rigidly sticking to what you planned. Some of my favourite drawings happened because I made a "mistake" and then figured out a creative way to work with it.

When something goes wrong, ask yourself: "Can I turn this into something?" More often than you'd expect, the answer is yes.

Tip 10: Use Reference Images Shamelessly

A lot of kids think that "good" artists draw everything from memory and imagination, and using a reference image (a photo or another drawing to look at) is somehow cheating. This is completely false.

Professional illustrators, concept artists, and even comic book artists use references all the time. References are how you get details right — the exact shape of a horse's nostril, how a bird's wing folds, what a hand looks like in a specific pose. You can't store all of that accurately in your memory.

Using a reference doesn't mean copying it exactly. It means using it as a guide while you create your own interpretation. Big difference!

Tip 11: Learn the Basic Proportions of the Human Figure

If you ever want to draw people — even cartoon people — understanding basic human proportions is essential. Here's a simplified version:

  • An adult figure is about 7-8 heads tall
  • The shoulders are about 2 head-widths wide
  • The halfway point of the body is roughly at the hips
  • The elbows reach to the waist level
  • The wrists reach to about mid-thigh
  • For a cute cartoon style, make the head about 1/4 of the total height (much bigger proportion than realistic)

You don't need to memorise all these at once. Just being aware that these proportional rules exist, and checking your drawings against them, will help enormously.

Tip 12: Vary Your Drawing Tools and Surfaces

Pencils are great for learning because you can erase. But at some point, try drawing with a pen, a marker, or even a brush and ink. These "un-erasable" tools force you to commit to your lines, which actually improves your pencil drawing too because you become more confident and deliberate.

Also try different surfaces: smooth Bristol paper for very clean lines, rough watercolour paper for texture, dark paper with white pen for a totally different effect. Each different tool and surface teaches you something new about how marks work.

Tip 13: Share Your Work and Accept Feedback Bravely

This one is hard, but important. Show your drawings to people — friends, family, your art teacher. The feedback you get (when it's from people you trust) is gold. Even "that looks great" feedback is valuable because it tells you what's working.

I post some of my drawings on KidsFunLearnClub (with my dad's help) and the comments from other kids and parents genuinely motivate me to keep going. Public accountability — knowing that people are watching your progress — is a powerful motivator.

When you get criticism, try to hear it as information rather than judgment. "The proportions look a bit off" is useful. It tells you what to focus on next. Thank the person and try again.

Tip 14: Build a "Warm-Up" Drawing Habit

Professional athletes warm up before training. Professional musicians play scales before practising. Artists should warm up too — and I didn't figure this out until quite recently.

A drawing warm-up is 2-5 minutes of loose, free mark-making before you start your actual drawing session. Draw random spirals, fill a page with parallel lines, draw the same shape 20 times in a row, write your name in different styles. This loosens up your hand and wrist, and gets your brain into drawing mode.

Since I started warming up before drawing, I've noticed that my drawing sessions feel better from the very start rather than taking 15 minutes to "get into it".

Tip 15: Focus on Progress, Not Perfection

My final and maybe most important tip: perfectionism is the enemy of improvement. If you give up on a drawing because it doesn't look how you imagined, you lose all the learning that imperfect drawing was teaching you. If you decide you're "bad at drawing" because a few attempts didn't look right, you quit before you've given yourself a real chance.

Every drawing you complete — good or bad — makes you a better drawer. The kid who fills 10 sketchbooks with imperfect drawings will be a much better artist than the kid who only starts drawings when they feel "ready" and gives up the moment something goes wrong.

Look at your drawings from a month ago and compare them to now. That progress is real and it's yours. Keep going.

Bonus: The Supplies I Actually Use

People always ask me what supplies I use, so here's my honest, minimal list:

  • Pencil: A standard HB pencil for sketching, a 2B for darker lines
  • Eraser: A kneaded eraser (the grey squishy kind) — it removes pencil without damaging the paper and can be shaped into a point for precision
  • Sketchbook: Any A5 or A4 sketchbook with at least 90gsm paper
  • Coloured pencils: A set of 24 is plenty to start. I prefer colour pencils to markers for most work because they blend better and are more forgiving
  • Fine-liner pen: For inking finished drawings before adding colour

You do not need expensive supplies to draw well. The most important "supply" is a consistent daily practice.

Conclusion: Start Today, Not When You Feel "Ready"

The best time to start drawing seriously was years ago. The second best time is right now. Open a notebook, grab whatever pencil is nearby, and draw something. It doesn't matter how it looks — just draw.

Every one of these 15 tips will mean more to you after you've tried it yourself than it does just reading it. So pick one tip, pick up your pencil, and put it into action today.

I'm rooting for you. If you try any of these tips, drop a comment below and let me know which one helped most!

— Parikshet, KidsFunLearnClub

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