112 drawing ideas to improve your skills

Do you ever feel like creating something but struggle to find inspiration?

We can relate.

When you sit down to draw, you need to be both inspired by what you’re doing and challenged enough for your skill level.

To get the creative juices flowing, we’ve put together a giant prompt list that combines objects and scenes from everyday life and some abstract ideas — plenty of opportunities to activate the imagination.

Whether drawing in a physical medium and putting pencil to paper or using a vector drawing tool like Linearity Curve, even if you're a touch device user, you'll be sure to find a source of inspiration here.

Drawing ideas to keep you busy for the rest of your life

How to use this drawing guide:

• This guide serves as a halfway house between inspiration and practice, helping you bridge the gap between ideas and skill development.
• The drawing ideas have been broken down into different sections. We've included real-life drawing ideas, mythical illustrations, and abstract ideas to challenge your imagination and hand.
• Plus, we’ve thrown in some ideas for kids if you have a class or children you'll be drawing with.
• Each idea is designed to be a fun source of inspiration and offer some skill-building challenges. Use the list however it best fits your interests and goals.

Section 1: Drawing the human form

Learning to capture the human figure is fundamental to drawing, and nothing quite reveals human emotion as a drawing does.

Anatomy drawing teaches you to illustrate proportion and perspective with simple shapes. Focusing on the human form is an excellent idea if you’re interested in drawing peopleas realistically as possible.

You can draw particular areas of the body, bodies in motion, facial expressions, clothing, and body proportions. The art of figure drawing never gets old — every person is uniquely beautiful.

1. Hand Gestures: Drawing hands is notoriously difficult, so gesture drawings are fantastic for challenging your skills. You can draw your own hands, a photo, or find reference photos online.
2. Self-portrait: Creating a self-portrait is something every artist should do. You can take a photograph or try to do it from memory.
3. Your family and friends: What better subject for drawing than the people you love spending time with? Not only will your next of kin treasure a drawing you did of them, but you may also see new aspects of their bodies and personalities that you hadn't noticed before.
4. A caricature of yourself: This requires imagination and is a great overall creativity challenge. You can make it as detailed or silly as you like. Look at some other caricatures for inspiration before you begin. Or try a style out of your comfort zone, like drawing yourself as an anime character.
5. Side profile: Drawing the side profile of a face teaches you another aspect of drawing faces and helps hone your perspective skills. Use solid lines to outline the shape and loose lines to add shading for a natural effect.
6. A nude figure: Drawing nude figures is one of the foundational drawing exercises taught in art because it teaches anatomy and perspective. You can try to find a live figure drawing class in your local area, look on Pinterest for drawing inspiration, or find resources in an art book or online art academy.
7. Eyes: These are the perfect drawing challenge because they are difficult to draw, especially trying to draw a pair of eyes that look the same. Drawing eyes is the ideal challenge for shading techniques, so if that’s something you’re looking to focus on, look no further. Also, remember that mastering the eye highlight is key to making your drawings come alive.
8. An aged face: This is another more advanced challenge, as drawing aged faces requires more skill (and a lot of shading). It’s an excellent exercise for developing your realistic drawing skills.
9. A dancing form: This will help you learn how to convey a sense of movement. It’s also the perfect exercise to hone your skills around the human body's proportions.
10. An emotive expression: Learning how to visually communicate emotion is an important part of developing any art skill. You can choose a reference of a face that’s hyper-expressive with laughter, tears, anger, or surprise.
11. People in conversation: This is an excellent challenge that combines skills in portraying movement, gesture, and emotion. It'll teach you how to bring life to a drawing with multiple figures.
12. A fashion illustration: You can choose to illustrate an outfit you own, something from your imagination, or simply copy an illustration from a fashion designer that you find online. To add more dimension, incorporate perspective lines into your sketches.

Section 2: Drawing animals

Besides capturing the human body, anatomical drawing also includes illustrating animal bodies and gestures.

Trying your hand at drawing various species will help you become comfortable depicting different proportions and textures. Pets, in particular, allow artists to capture something more profound than just the animal’s body.

Maybe there's something about a cat, dog, or bird that you find adorable, and you want to try to portray their personality and cuteness in the drawing.

Conveying the love you feel for the animal to the viewer is crucial for learning to communicate well visually.

1. Cats: These creatures are fascinating drawing subjects. And this is not only for cat lovers — feline bodies can make contortions that can be quite difficult to illustrate in a drawing. Depicting cat fur is an excellent shading exercise. Check out our tutorial on how to draw a cat.
2. Dogs: There are so many different breeds of dogs, and we're sure your dog is one in a million. Drawing some of the various breeds will keep you busy for a while and is a good opportunity to develop your skills with texture and pattern. Drawing a Poodle, a Husky, or an Afghan Hound will help you learn how to portray dogs using different shapes and textures. Check out our tutorial on how to draw a dog.
3. Fish: Another excellent opportunity to play with textures and patterns. Plus, drawing a fish in its underwater context will allow you to observe how light and shade refract in water. Here's our step-by-step tutorial on how to draw a fish.
4. Koala bears: They’re adorable and apparently quite smelly. You might not have the opportunity to smell one in real life, but you can rely on reference pictures from books or the internet to capture its furry form.
5. Primates: If you study primates closely, you’ll notice their faces are highly expressive. These animals make for an excellent drawing challenge because of the curved lines, texture, and details in their faces and hands. You can also have fun and humanize your primate drawing subject by adding clothes and accessories. Here's our tutorial on how to draw a monkey.
6. Birds: You can play with the colors of parrots and flamingos and challenge yourself to depict movement by drawing birds in flight. Practice drawing birds at eye level to understand their unique postures and movements better. 
7. Insects: The most diverse species of the animal kingdom. You could spend a lifetime studying these creatures and capturing their details in various drawing mediums.
8. Your pets: Drawing your pets is always fair game, as you know their quirks and personalities best.  If you can't get your pet to pose long enough, work from a reference photo that captures them in a way that inspires you.
9. Dinosaurs: These ancient creatures can be fun to draw, and there are many kinds to choose from. It’s also a good challenge for playing with unusual textures and proportions.
10. Elephants: These beautiful creatures have thick, textured skin that makes for a challenging exercise in shading.
11. Snakes: Get creative with this one and draw a pet snake wrapped around its prey or draw the mythological character Medusa with snakes for hair.
12. Butterflies: Practice portraying beautiful patterns and color combinations and get creative with your unique patterns on butterfly wings. Use inspiration from nature to replicate the intricate patterns on butterfly wings or incorporate elements of animal prints into your design for a creative twist.
13. Traces of animals: Set out some juicy fruit on a piece of paper and watch the birds peck at it. Then, turn the paper with the juice marks into a drawing.

Source: Pinterest

Section 3: Imagining mythical creatures

If you’re inspired by magic, fiction, and mythology, drawing a fantastical creature might motivate you.

It'll also activate your imagination and open your mind to unique ideas that can lead to conceptualizing your own creatures. Drawing mythical creatures falls more on the challenging side of the difficulty scale, but you can always simplify your drawing ideas to basic line drawings.

Practice drawing different realistic textures such as long and short fur, scales, teeth, horns, and nails. This will help you hone the craft of drawing fantasy characters.

1. Dragons: You can challenge yourself to intricacy and detail with these timeless creatures. Use white lines on darker paper to emphasize highlights and create a glowing effect for your dragon. Find some references by other artists and design your own character.
2. Mermaids: An excellent opportunity to combine your skills in human form and animal form, not to mention depicting water as well.
3. Huldra: This seductive forest-dwelling creature from Norse mythology similarly challenges you to combine human and animal form, with the option to add the context of the creature’s environment.
4. Hecatoncheires: This creature from Greek mythology is terrifying. If you’re into horror, you might enjoy it. It'll make for a more advanced drawing project.
5. Centaurs: Another excellent option for combining human form and animal form. Try challenging yourself to get as detailed as possible by depicting this creature's muscular physique.
6. Your favorite mythical creature: Can you come up with your own mythical creature? You can guide the process by compiling and combining references from other creatures. For example, you can combine the features of your preferred animals with those of mystical creatures for a unique result.
7. Cerberus: The mythological three-headed dog is an excellent opportunity to challenge your skills.
8. Fairies: You can adjust this subject matter according to your skill level, making it as simple or complex as you prefer. You can also play with color, light, and various textures.
9. Your favorite superhero: Do you have a favorite superhero? Why not combine their specific design with figure drawing exercises? This is especially effective if you want to start drawing your own comics.
10. A unicorn: Similarly to the fairy, you can adjust this to be as beginner-basic or intricately detailed as you wish.
11. Vampires: There is much reference imagery available for this drawing idea because of the vast number of series and films that portray vampires. Choose a favorite character that inspires you and try your hand at depicting them. Challenge yourself by imagining your character with a different hair color, clothes, or setting (for example, what did your character look like in school?).

Section 4: Drawing food

Food art is one of those uncanny, quirky categories of drawing that's lighthearted and visually stimulating. It's an art form that lends itself to mistakes and stray marks because fruit can symbolize many things.

1. Your favorite breakfast food: A creative challenge from start to finish: make the breakfast, take a beautiful photo, and then draw it.
2. An apple: Art teachers love apples. Not because they’re teachers but because apples are simple drawing ideas that you can adjust to any skill level. Try drawing an apple from real life. Then, try drawing it in a different color or style.
3. A super decadent ice cream: Imagine five scoops topped with cream, sprinkles, cookies, chocolate sauce, and a cherry to finish it off. You can add as many toppings and flavors as you like — make the biggest sundae you've ever seen.
4. A bottle of your favorite soft drink or beer: Drawing glass bottles allows you to practice light and shading on a smooth, reflective surface. Capture the shine and reflection by focusing on the light highlight on the bottle's surface.
5. A fruit bowl: Many famous artists such as Paul Cezanne and Pablo Picasso have depicted the humble fruit bowl at some point in their careers. Whether for practice or for your kitchen space, try to capture the colors and textures of different fruit together in a bowl for a fresh drawing idea.
6. A piece of cake: Make it decadent and beautiful. You can also include fine china, silverware, and a patterned tablecloth to your drawing to create more interest. Add texture and depth to the frosting by using smooth swipe gestures to mimic the natural swirls and layers of the dessert.
7. Sushi: Sushi offers child-like playfulness to food. Try to play with a unique illustration style to depict the simple lines and shapes of the various types of sushi. To enhance texture and light reflections on sushi pieces, sketch on mid-grey paper for subtle shading and contrast.
8. Your favorite takeout: You can order it and copy it from real life or take a photo. This could make a fun date night idea or an art-inspired hangout with your friends. Order takeout, then draw it in your own style. Incorporating elements from your daily lives, like drawing the meals you enjoy most, can make your artwork more relatable and personal.
9. A salad: Another simple drawing idea, but if you pick the right ingredients, you can make it colorful and visually interesting.
10. Food art: Have you seen food art before? It’s when you combine real food with drawings to create unique artwork. For instance, turning citrus fruit into jellyfish (see below).
11. A cup of warm, steamy coffee: Is coffee the first thing you think of in the morning? Why not trying a simple line drawing of your favorite brew? This makes for a lovely little artwork you could even gift to a friend who also loves coffee. Making this drawing part of your morning routine could unearth some interesting drawing ideas each day.

Section 5: Drawing the outdoors

1. Cityscapes: Choose a city and draw the skyline. You can trace the silhouette and color it in or try to capture all the windows and facets of each building. You could also gift the finished product to a friend or relative who loves that city.
2. Botanical drawings: If you love flowers and plants, you'll love drawing them. Think of your favorite flower and focus on the minute details of these natural subjects and try to accurately capture the combination of colors. With much patience, you may be surprised by the level of preciseness you can achieve.
3. Architectural drawings: Are you fascinated by architecture throughout the centuries? Consider keeping a sketchbook on hand to sketch beautiful buildings on your daily commute.
4. The view in front of you: Drawing can happen anywhere. At the park, the mall, or a quiet diner late at night. Start with familiar subjects around you to ease into the process, and make an outing of it to capture real-life scenes.
5. Seascapes: The ocean is very challenging to draw. There’s a lot of motion, shading, and light to capture. And at the back of your mind, you know that water is actually transparent. But your challenge is to find ways to simplify the scene and put it on paper. Look for reference pictures that inspire you and are appropriate for your skill level. Once you've mastered some of the beach textures, go to a local spot and try it en plein air.
6. Trees: Trees are majestic and always give a sense of history. Capture these giants in their natural habitats or look for topiary specimens.
7. A sandy desert: You could get creative with this drawing idea and fill in the dunes with patterns. Add some cacti and a broken-down car to tell a story. Avoid a stilted drawing by focusing on smooth transitions between dunes and subtle shading for depth.
8. A train station: Try to capture the busyness of the scene with people going about their day. Or, draw the trains and their locomotives if you're more interested in mechanical engineering.
9. Detailed landscapes: Choose a landscape, either from a photograph or a real-life view, and attempt to capture its essence. Pay attention to the details—the texture of trees, the reflection in the water, the shadows, and the light. Remember to add a horizon line to create a sense of vastness and distance. Add wildlife subjects such as deer, birds, or insects to bring life and a sense of interaction to the scene.
10. Clouds: No two clouds look the same. Capturing these billowy shapeshifters is a great practice for shading. For a unique twist, use tinted paper to capture the subtle contrast of light and shadow in clouds.
11. A rose: These delicate flowers are a classic subject matter and notoriously tricky to capture realistically. Challenge your skills with this drawing idea.

Section 6: Drawing interiors

Now, we'll dive into some interior drawing prompts to help you practice capturing the essence of indoor spaces.

1. Indoor plants: Choose a favorite plant, or group a bunch of them together, and try to draw from real life.
2. Game controllers: It may seem too basic, but drawing electronics can be pretty challenging. Give it a try.
3. A room in your home: Take a photo of your favorite room and draw it. You can experiment with different styles and mediums to capture the essence of the room — is it airy and warm, or cast in dappled shade as the sun sets? Starting with pencil drawings can help you focus on the structure, shading, and perspective before adding more details or colors.
4. A peaceful day indoors: Capture the ambiance of a relaxing day at home. Cats, socks, hot chocolate, and your favorite hobby.
5. Books: Stack some of your books up and draw them. You could also try to redraw the book cover you're reading. Include a shape gap between the books to create a sense of depth and realism in your drawing.
6. Musical instruments: Challenge yourself by making super detailed drawings, or try making simple line drawings of various instruments at first. Try using mechanical drawing techniques to capture the precision and details of a piano, guitar, or violin.
7. An eccentric lamp: Simple, yet striking. This can be a good exercise to practice shading and artificial lighting in your drawings.
8. A bath: Bathing and grooming have been popular subject matters throughout history. It's a private space where you can completely be yourself and practice self-care. Try to express the calm and relaxation you feel in your bath.
9. A drinking glass: Attempt a hyperrealistic drawing of a glass by focusing on reflections, transparency, and light refraction for a strikingly lifelike effect.
10. Cutlery: Don't underestimate the power of simple designs. We take cutlery for granted, but have you ever stopped and considered how these were designed? Drawing cutlery and other utensils will grow your appreciation of everyday designed objects.‍
11. An armchair: Chairs represent the people that use them, and often, a good sofa has an imprint of the bodies that frequent it. Even TV series like The Simpsons and Friends have iconic couches. Make it colorful, patterned, rugged, or fancy. Have fun with it.

Section 7: Drawing shapes and patterns

Many of the drawing ideas we've explored so far will help advance your realism skills and empower you to develop a unique drawing style.

The ideas listed below, however, will challenge your creative thinking and teach you to play in the abstract realm. Abstract drawing is a valuable and beautiful part of art.

1. Zentangles: They don’t teach this in geometry, but it exists.The zentangle concept was invented by an American monk, Rick Roberts, and artist, Maria Thomas. It's basically a combination of many different patterns inside an organic shape. The idea is to create a meditative exercise through drawing. Suggestion: Experiment with tinted paper as a base for your zentangles
2. Free-flow scribbles: Get the creative juices flowing and warm up your hand with some free-flow scribbling. Let go of any preconceived ideas about what your drawing should look like. Create continuous lines to further explore this exercise and allow your creativity to flow naturally.
3. Basic shapes: Try drawing as many as possible, as accurately as you can, freehand. Even a seemingly boring subject drawing simple shapes can be transformed into a meditative process when you experiment with patterns, shading, and textures.
4. Circles, circles, circles: These are essential for any drawing practice. Circles form the basis of many natural and mechanical objects. Drawing circles as accurately as you can from freehand trains your hand to become steady.
5. Cubes: An excellent challenge for practicing depth and perspective. For a three-dimensional effect, incorporate dark shapes and lighter areas, to create strong contrasts that enhance the visual impact.
6. An icosahedron: This is a challenging shape to draw. An icosahedron is a polygon with 20 sides. We recommend downloading an icosahedron pattern and making one out of paper. This way, you can observe it in different positions and light settings.
7. Spheres: Practice drawing circles, but with the added challenge of depth. Can you make it look perfectly spherical?
8. Geometric patterns: Geometric patterns are fascinating. They have a rich and varied history and help us to understand mathematical concepts. Challenge yourself by conceptualizing your own pattern of lines or finding one online to trace. You can even experiment with incorporating animal prints, like zebra stripes or leopard spots, into your geometric designs to merge natural elements with abstract art.            
9. Draw a landscape: Fill each element with a different pattern.
10. An impossible triangle: The funny thing about impossible triangles is they're not impossible to draw. This is a great brain exercise, too.
11. Get abstract: Choose an object or person and interpret it as an abstract drawing.

Section 8: Imagination challenge

Any idea is fair game when drawing from your imagination.

It can be difficult to draw without a reference, but it'll develop your creativity and tap into your authentic style. The list below consists of drawing prompts designed to activate your imagination and challenge your hand.

1. Draw something true to you.
2. Draw how you feel right now.
3. Illustrate something from your favorite book.
4. Draw your favorite song.
5. Draw something you couldn’t live without.
6. Draw a scene from your imagination.
7. Create your dream house.
8. Try to capture a recent dream or nightmare in a drawing.
9. Draw love.
10. Do a Rorschach test and write down what you see.
11. Make hand imprints and turn them into characters.
12. Draw a cat at a birthday party.
13. Combine two or more animals to come up with one of your own.
14. Draw yourself as a mythical creature or superhero.
15. Draw your ideal day as a comic strip.
16. Draw something impossible.
17. Design a logo for your next big idea.
18. Create a stick-figure flipbook animation.
19. Reimagine a famous artwork in your own style.
20. Draw an object upside down.

Section 9: Drawing ideas for kids

You might have children of your own or young students that you teach, so here are some ideas to start nurturing the creativity of the little ones.

These ideas don’t require much explanation. You can choose from the list and find references online or in real life. And they will be equally entertaining for adults.

1. A cupcake with a face.
2. Your favorite animal.
3. Your favorite cartoon characters.
4. Draw a bird using the outline of your hand.
5. A self-portrait.
6. A full-length person.
7. Draw a rabbit using the outline of your hand.
8. Numbers 1–10, each with a different pattern inside.
9. Draw what happiness feels like.
10. Draw the alphabet and make each letter a character.
11. Concentric circles.
12. Draw a tree from your imagination — like a palm tree at the beach.

Why is drawing so hard, though?

Drawing is a difficult artistic skill to master. Whether you’re taking it on as a new hobby or improving the drawing skills you already possess, growth is always challenging. When you haven’t practiced enough, you'll struggle to create accurate drawings.

Starting with a few basic drawing ideas never hurts. Try looking at pictures of everyday things like cute animals or a teapot and begin practicing basic drawing methods. Use a standard eraser pen to clean up your work, and keep practicing. These little adjustments help transform a rough sketch into a polished piece over time. It’s important not to judge your ability or talent — remember that the art of drawing requires lots of practice.

And remember to choose the right drawing exercises for your skill level. If you choose something too difficult, you may become frustrated and disheartened. If you choose something too easy, you'll get bored and hinder your advancement.

How to improve your drawing skills

Practicing fun or random drawing ideas is just the tip of the iceberg regarding what you can do to improve your creativity skills.

There are certain exercises you can do specifically for drawing that are excellent for improving your overall creativity. We’ve listed some suggestions below:

Drawing tips

• First and foremost, tap into your creative energy by ensuring your nervous system is balanced. This means taking care of yourself and ensuring you're well-rested and not overly stressed. Engaging in healthy activities that make you feel good (such as hiking, baking, or playing board games) is essential for developing your creativity.
• Practice drawing perspective. This is one of the foundational drawing skills that help you portray subjects realistically. You can practice perspective by choosing any subject, from a room to a landscape or an object, and drawing it from different angles. You can create drawing grids to help you understand how perspective works.
• Learn how to sketch on paper. Sketching objects, buildings, and people under various light sources will improve your fundamental drawing abilities.
• Make use of drawing tutorials online. The internet is a vast landscape full of tutorials. You can find plenty of free drawing tutorials on Linearity Academy, YouTube, and online courses. Skillshare is an excellent platform for building your creative skills. There are plenty of drawing tutorials, from creating a convincing outer space scene to bringing a comic book character to life and even mastering everyday objects.

• Practice creating digital art. Many artistic forms can be emulated on digital drawing surfaces such as computers, tablets, or drawing pads. With powerful digital tools for drawing, such as Linearity Curve, you can unleash your creativity without limitations. For example, you can change your digital drawing to greyscale to create a pencil or charcoal look.
• Have you tried following a few design challenges? They can be quite motivating when you want to improve and stay inspired. Participating in or setting up drawing challenges for yourself will ensure you’re constantly pushing your skills to the next level.

• If you’re a beginner, drawing from a reference helps you learn how things from reality transfer onto a page. It helps you analyze proportions, perspective, and light. However, you mustn't become overdependent on reference images and spend your time trying to copy other artists.
• Look for #drawinghacks on social media. TikTok, Instagram, and Pinterest are inspiring creative platforms where you can find original drawing ideas.
• Follow your favorite artists on social media to stay inspired. Curate your own "treasure trove" of inspiration sources.
• You can scout your local area for art teachers and institutions offering in-person drawing courses or opt for an online one.
• If your budget allows (yes, we know they're expensive), buy a design or drawing book to help with ideas, learning, and inspiration. Some of the most recommended drawing books you might want to check out are:
  • Dover Anatomy For Artists (1970) by Reginald Marsh
  • Perspective Made Easy (1999) by Ernest R. Norling
  • The Sketchbook of Loish: Art in Progress (2018) by Lois Van BaarleSketching From The Imagination: Creatures and Monsters (2019) by 3dtotal Publishing

Image source: Goodreads

Sharpen your drawing skills with Linearity Curve

You’ve now got a comprehensive list of drawing ideas, from mastering human anatomy to crafting mythical creatures or playful food art. Whether you’re sketching on paper or using digital tools, the key is to keep experimenting and challenging your creativity.

Ready to take your art to the digital realm? Linearity Curve is your perfect companion. With intuitive vector drawing features and seamless interface, it makes bringing your ideas to life effortless — whether you’re practicing realism or diving into abstract styles.

Download Linearity Curve for free and start your next masterpiece today. Your inspiration is waiting!

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