How I learned to draw in a few months, starting from zero

RK -

Every New Year's, my husband and I have a seminar where we reflect on the past year and set goals for the year to come. For this year, I had three goals, one of which was to learn to draw. For as long as I could remember, I'd told myself that I could never become an architect because of my inability to draw, and this year, I decided to take that lousy excuse out of the equation. I made it my goal of 2024 to learn to draw like an architect.

This was a good goal, especially since I've never really even tried drawing or learning to draw because of this limiting mindset I always held.

Now, I can confidently say that I achieved the goal - and not just by subjective standards, because in June, I actually passed the drawing exam (entrance test) of a university of architecture.

Here's what I did to learn to draw like an architect, starting from zero:

  1. I watched a lot of YouTube videos where architects draw buildings. The videos were shot in first person point of view, so I could imagine that it was I who was doing the drawing. This helped me brainwash myself into thinking that drawing isn't hard and that I could do it.
  2. I bought David Drazil's books, Sketch Like an Architect: Step-by-Step From Lines to Perspective, Sketch Like an Architect: Advanced Techniques and Draw Like an Artist: 100 Buildings and Architectural Forms, and did the exercises in them. This helped me learn to draw in all kinds of different perspectives.
  3. I drew buildings from my own imagination and afterwards pinpointed what was wrong in the drawings. This helped me learn from my own mistakes.
  4. I found old drawing exams (entrance tests) online and did them.
  5. I thought about drawing. All. The. Time.

So that's what I did for five months. What's funny is that going to the drawing exam, I wasn't sure if I was going to be good enough. There were six exercises, some of which went well, some of which didn't. (Or so I thought, until I got the results.) In retrospect, perhaps I should've just had more fun there.

Now I know, of course, that confidence, and believing that you can draw like an architect, is just as important as the skill itself.

RK out.