What To Draw When You Have No Ideas

You're looking at a bare sketchbook page and you lot're at a loss for your next drawing idea…again. Whether you need a creative break in the day, a weekend project, or more drawing prompts to fill the pages, information technology can be challenging to keep generating cool cartoon ideas.

We've compiled a listing of ideas, tips, and resource to jumpstart your creative juices no matter your cartoon expertise – now grab your tools and go going.

Drawing Ideas: People

Depict a caricature of yourself.
Draw yourself as a superhero.
Draw self-portraits from different perspectives. Try positioning a mirror from different angles.
Sketch your easily in dissimilar positions. Draw your feet.
Draw a shut up of the heart. Try your teeth. Practice a study of different people's ears.
Depict a cocky-portrait from your reflection in a spoon.
Draw yourself double your historic period.
Study and sketch people in cafes, parks, and on public transportation.

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Drawing Ideas: Mural/Perspective

Draw the view out of a window.
Draw the clouds.
Capture the view from your car'due south rearview mirror.
Play with perspective: expect upwards under a bridge, between loftier rises, or at the ceiling of an elaborate edifice. Look down over an overpass, a cliff, or from a balcony.

Drawing Ideas: Imagination

Draw an object and give it a face.
Create an alternate cover to your favorite book or album.
Illustrate a scene from your favorite song.
Draw a scene or character from your favorite book.
Illustrate your favorite fairy-tale.
Invent your ain insects.
Draw an intricate made up bloom. Arrive a bouquet.
Design your own typeface.
Depict something truthful.
Draw something false.
Create your own game lath.
Combine animals to make your own mythical creature.
Draw a scene from a dream you've had.
Describe a home in outer space.
Play the exquisite corpse drawing game.
Fill up the page with things with wheels.
Fill up the page with things that bladder.
Fill the page with robots.
Combine two subjects that don't belong together in the same scene.
Design your personal logo.
Carve up a newspaper into 6 sections and create a different pattern in each one.

Drawing Ideas: Nonetheless life

Draw a towel in different positions: crumpled, hanging, strewn on the ground.
Get a handful of utensils and toss them on the table. Draw them equally they land.
Draw a notwithstanding life of items from your fridge or pantry.
Draw the ingredients of your next meal earlier your set it.
Describe an old pair of shoes.
Depict a pile of unfolded laundry.
Draw a fruit or vegetable sliced open up.
Depict the inside of your closet.
Draw your room before it's cleaned.
Describe the same notwithstanding life 3 times, zooming farther in each time.

Drawing Ideas: Weeklong

In your sketchbook, brand 7 random scribbles or shapes. Over the class of a calendar week, complete each drawing.
Illustrate your to-practise list for the week
Draw every meal you consume for a week
Pick a subject and illustrate information technology a different way for vii days.
Document your week every bit it progresses as a comic strip.

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Drawing Exercises

Bullheaded contour drawing: Without looking at your paper, describe whatsoever object, such as your own mitt, in one continuous line without lifting your hand from the folio. Grab a partner and practice simultaneous blind profile portraits of each other.
Subtractive cartoon: Try this ane with charcoal. Using information technology horizontally, shade your paper an even value of grey. At present "draw" with your eraser – erase the highlights of your subject.
Left & right: Describe something with your ascendant hand, and so your non-dominant hand .
Everything else: Draw the negative space around an object.
Topsy turvy: Depict a portrait from an upside downwardly photo.
Scenes from retentivity: Sketch 3 scenes from your day from memory. Play with perspective and try this daily.
Re-create the masters: Draw a painting by your favorite painter. Or get to a museum and describe works you enjoy.
360 degrees: Choose an object and describe its outline. Turn the object slightly and draw the outline again. Repeat.
Minimalist: Draw something with the fewest lines possible.
Become the gist: A great mode to approach drawing the human body, gesture drawing captures the basic form of your subject in a loose manner that often expresses emotion. Try limiting your fourth dimension to gesture drawings of 10-30 seconds.
Different techniques: Effort shading unlike ways : hatching, cross hatching, stippling, and more.
Light it upwards: Play with lighting. Describe exterior at different types of the mean solar day and within using multiple or single light sources from unlike angles.

Drawing Tips

Consider the following tips to assist improve your drawing skills:

Endeavor unlike media
Pencil drawings are simply the tip of the iceberg. Try charcoal, pastels, pens, markers, crayons, and conte crayons. Experiment and mix media to notice what produces your all-time drawings.
Draw daily and at the correct time
Don't but wait until Inktober to get on the grind. Find the time of day in which y'all have the well-nigh artistic energy and don't waver from information technology. After the first week it will settle in as routine.
Commit to a drawing series online
Tumblr and Instagram among other platforms offer daily cartoon challenges (think Inktober, but yearlong). Joining one of these and posting your drawings will increment your accountability and motivation. Non only will set up themes give you direction and just the right amount of constraints to work inside, you'll also be joining a creative community that shares feedback.

Drawing Resources

Bank check out the following resource for more cartoon ideas:

CreativeLive.com is chock-full of cartoon resources. Check out: How to Brand Money Drawing For Fun , 5 Drawing Exercises That Will Turn Anyone into an Artist , 5 Drawing Exercises To Learn How to Depict Perspective , Cartoon for Graphic Design: 6 Exercises to Sharpen Your Skills , Drawing the Everyday Every Mean solar day , and Drawing Nuts
Drawing Ideas: A Hand-Drawn Approach For Better Pattern by Mark Baskinger and William Bardel, Watson-Guptill Publications
Drawing: A Consummate Guide past Giovanni Civardi, Search Printing
The Main Guide to Cartoon Anime past Chris Hart, Cartoon with Christopher Hart
365 Days of Cartoon by Lorna Scobie, Chronicle Books