If you’ve been learning to draw and feel like you’re not getting anywhere, it’s very easy to assume you simply don’t have the talent for it.

But in my experience, talent is rarely what holds you back.

More often, it comes down to how you’re practising, what you’re expecting from yourself, and whether you’re giving your eye enough time to catch up with your hand.

Here are seven of the most common reasons why beginners fail at drawing.

1. Never actually starting

This sounds obvious, but it’s surprisingly common.

You buy a new sketchbook. You sharpen the pencils. You watch a few tutorials, save some reference images and spend half an hour deciding whether you really need a 2B or a 4B.

And somehow, no drawing actually happens.

There’s a feeling that if you can just get the right materials, understand the technique a little better or find the perfect subject, you’ll be more prepared.

But drawing doesn’t really work like that.

Your first few drawings are supposed to feel awkward. You’re learning a new visual language and your hand hasn’t caught up yet. You’ll make the same mistakes over and over and get frustrated at your lack of progress. That’s 100% normal.

The sketchbook only becomes useful once it has marks in it.

2. Quitting too soon

One of the strange things about learning to draw is that your taste often develops faster than your ability.

You can look at your drawing and immediately see that something isn’t quite right, but you don’t yet have the skills to fix it.

That gap can be frustrating.

Someone might spend three weeks drawing, compare their work with an artist who has been practising for twenty years and decide, “I’m just not very good at this.”

But three weeks is hardly any time.

When students send me a drawing from when they first started alongside something they’ve made a year later, the difference can be enormous.

You just have to keep drawing long enough to see it your progress

3. Not doing enough drawings

We can become very precious about a drawing.

You choose a nice sheet of paper, carefully measure everything out and then spend hours trying not to make a mistake.

But you often learn much more from ten quick drawings than you do from one drawing you’re frightened of ruining.

Small studies are brilliant for this.

Five-minute sketches. Value studies. Simple shapes. Drawing the same object from three different angles.

You’re removing some of the pressure and increasing the number of visual problems you have to solve.

And that’s really what practice is.

The more drawings you make, the less important any individual drawing becomes.

Mistakes stop feeling like failures and start becoming useful information.

4. Not drawing consistently enough

A long drawing session every couple of weeks can feel productive, but shorter and more regular practice is usually much more useful.

Drawing relies heavily on observation, and your memory for learning relies on the forgetting curve.

You’re training yourself to notice angles, proportions, shapes, values and relationships that you might previously have ignored.

And by drawing regularly, you stop yourself having to relearn everything from scratch.

Sometimes keeping the habit going is enough.

5. Trying to learn everything at once

Portraits. Perspective. Figure drawing. Landscapes. Charcoal. Coloured pencils. Ink.

There’s nothing wrong with being curious, but beginners can sometimes jump between subjects and materials so quickly that they never stay with one problem long enough to understand it.

If you spend a few weeks drawing simple still lifes, for example, you begin to recognise the same problems appearing again and again.

How wide is this compared with that?

What angle is that line?

Where is the darkest dark?

Why does my ellipse look out?

That repetition is incredibly valuable.

You don’t need less enthusiasm. You just need to focus it for a little longer.

6. Only choosing subjects you know you can draw

There’s a balance here.

You don’t want every drawing to feel impossible, but you also don’t want to spend all your time repeating things that already feel comfortable.

A slightly more difficult subject forces you to look harder.

Perhaps you normally draw single objects, so you try a simple still life.

Perhaps you always work small, so you make a larger drawing.

Perhaps you avoid hands because they look complicated, so you spend a week drawing nothing but hands.

You don’t need a huge leap.

Just choose something that feels slightly beyond where you are now.

7. Drawing what you think you see

This might be the biggest one of all.

When beginners draw an eye, they often draw their idea of an eye.

When they draw a tree, they draw their symbol for a tree.

A cup becomes two parallel sides with an oval on top because that’s what we know a cup looks like.

But drawing improves when you stop naming things and start looking at shapes.

Instead of thinking, “I’m drawing a nose,” you start noticing the angle of one edge, the shape of the shadow underneath it and how far it sits from the eye.

Instead of drawing a tree, you notice the particular silhouette of that tree.

This is why drawing can feel surprisingly difficult at first.

You’re not really learning how to move a pencil.

You’re learning how to see.

Most of the skills that make someone “good at drawing” aren’t mysterious gifts. They’re habits of observation that can be practised as a learnable skill.

Keep turning up, keep looking carefully and keep making drawings.

The improvement often happens more quietly than you expect.

What should you work on next?

You might be reading through this list and nodding along, recognising yourself in one or two of these points.

But that still leaves the difficult question: what should you actually work on next?

That’s where a structured course can be so useful.

Not because it will magically turn you into a drawing master, but because it gives your practice a clear direction. It helps you know what to focus on, what to practise, and in what order, so that good habits can form and your knowledge, confidence and skills can build on each other.

You still have to do the drawing.

But instead of wondering whether you’re practising the right thing, you have a path to follow.

And often, that little bit of structure is what turns good intentions into real progress!

(I’m offering 40% off the beginner drawing courses for the next few days; the offer is already applied)

Absolute Beginners Drawing Course
Light and Shadow Drawing Course
Urban Sketching Drawing Course
Landscape Sketching Drawing Course

The moment you tell yourself, “I need to draw more,” the process can suddenly feel pressured, important, loaded with expectations… and strangely less enjoyable.

Drawing becomes “Art.”

The sketchbook becomes a test.

Every blank page starts quietly asking: “Is this good enough?”

And often, that pressure arrives before the pencil has even touched the paper.

Recently, Kathy emailed me describing something very similar. She explained that once she actually begins drawing, she quickly loses herself in the process and enjoys it enormously. The challenge wasn’t really drawing itself; it was getting started.

The search for the “perfect” subject or composition had become so overwhelming that it was preventing the simple act of drawing in the first place.

So I’d like to suggest an alternative approach: stop thinking of it as drawing and start thinking of it as observing.

The moment you shift into observation, a lot of the pressure disappears. There’s no longer the expectation that something has to become a finished piece of art. You’re simply noticing things.

You might observe the colour shift within a shadow.

The way fabric folds across the arm of a chair.

The shape of a reflected highlight on a mug.

Or you might simply experiment with a new material or pencil without any expectation of producing something “good.”

There’s a freedom in that mindset because the work no longer feels as though it needs to be framed, judged, or critiqued. The sketchbook becomes a place for curiosity rather than performance.

And really, that’s what drawing has always been: observation made visible.

By reframing it this way, you quietly remove the weight of the capital “D” in Drawing.

Instead of thinking: “I’m going to make a good drawing.” Try thinking: “I’m just going to fill one page with observations.”

And then you get to unlock a sense of frictionless creating; some of the most valuable sketchbooks are visually messy but mentally free.

Morning class,

The best thing I’ve done for my studio practice this year happens the night before I paint.

I call it the Midnight Sketch Club.

What separates a painting that ‘works’ from one that doesn’t is usually decided long before the first brushstroke goes down.

You need to recognise what to look out for, where your natural tendencies can lead to mistakes and how the values will work.

And the best way to figure all that out?

A sketch and a value study.

But most beginners don’t do them. Because they think they are boring.

Now, I know what you’re thinking because I do this too.

You see a subject, you get excited, and you think, “Right, I’m just going to dive straight in. I don’t need to do a sketch first—I’ll figure it out as I go.”

And then three hours in, you’re wrestling with a painting that’s fighting you every step of the way because you didn’t take twenty minutes to work out the problems beforehand.

On the Venice Light and Shadow Course, we do small tonal value studies before committing to a larger-scale painting.

On the How to Paint a Peony Course, we paint a simplified ‘poster study’ of the peony before committing to the main painting.

It’s like running through a dress rehearsal before the main performance.

But here’s what I’ve started doing instead.

The night before I paint, usually around midnight, because I’m a bit of a night owl, I’ll spend 15-30 minutes sketching out the subject.

Nothing fancy.

Just getting the composition down, mapping out the value structure, seeing where the darks and lights fall, and figuring out where the problems are going to crop up. It might be colour notes, or things I noticed.

You can do this with actual physical sketches, or on an iPad if you prefer digital. Doesn’t matter. What matters is you’re thinking about the painting before you’re in the painting.

And here’s the magic part: you sleep on it.

You give your brain a whole night to process what you learned. You step back from the subject. And when you wake up the next morning, something interesting happens: you’re actually more excited to paint it, not less. Because now, you’re not walking into the unknown.

You know what you’re doing.

You know what to look out for.

You’ve already solved half the problems while you were asleep.

The preparation is the work

It’s a bit like how film directors don’t just show up on set and wing it. They spend months in pre-production, storyboarding every shot (essentially a hand-drawn version of the final movie), working out every angle, so that when it’s time to actually film, they’re not figuring things out; they’re executing a plan.

Pixar spent over 2.5 years storyboarding Toystory before they animated a single frame.

That preparation is the work. The final painting, the final film, the final animation is the execution of all that thinking.

Why you need tea & biscuits

My brothers and sisters think I spend my days lounging around in some sort of artistic reverie, wafting a paintbrush toward a canvas in a state of internal bliss.

What we’re actually doing when we paint is solving hundreds of tiny problems, one after another, making decision after decision after decision. Which edge to soften? Where does that value shift? Is this colour too warm? Should that brushstroke follow the form or cut across it? It’s exhausting.

That’s why we need all the tea and biscuits afterwards, we’re recovering from genuine mental effort!

And this is exactly why my Midnight Sketch Club works so well. By sketching the night before, you’re solving a huge chunk of those problems in advance.

Now you can actually focus on the painting itself, rather than burning through your decision-making energy just trying to figure out where things go.

I was listening to a podcast, and Darren Cahill, co-coach of the current world No. 1 tennis player, Jannik Sinner, discussed Roger Federer’s work ethic.

“I did a week with Roger Federer and was stunned how hard he worked on the practice court. Four and five-hour blocks on the practice court. I never knew this about Roger because if you go and watch Roger warming up for a match, it looks like he’s going out to play with a country club, or he’s just slapping the ball around, barely out of his feet.”

He said:

“Darren, all the hard work is done in the lead-up. I just have to feel the ball and feel good about my game. Everything is done away from the public’s eyes. The actual match court is just for show. It’s when you are practising inside a stadium with zero people watching, that’s what really matters, and that’s where you’re putting in all that hard work. If you can accomplish that, then you can accomplish some great things.” – Roger Federer

So sketch at midnight

Map the values. Find the problems. Then sleep on it.

I think you’ll be surprised at how much better your paintings turn out when you’ve given yourself that gift of preparation.

Have a great evening,

Will

The brain is a forgetting machine

Imagine you’re in a drawing class.

Your pencil flows across the paper, and suddenly, it all makes sense. The proportions look right, the shading actually resembles the model, and you feel like you’re ‘getting it!’

You pack up your supplies with quiet confidence, already daydreaming about the drawings you’ll make at home next week.

Then life gets busy. A week later, you finally sit down to draw again, excited to pick up where you left off. You sharpen your pencil, study your subject, and… nothing.

The connection is gone. The techniques that seemed so natural have vanished. You’re not just rusty, you feel like you’re starting entirely from scratch.

It’s as if everything you learned has slipped away.

You’re not alone.

You’ve just run into one of the most common experiences in learning: the forgetting curve.

It’s impossible not to pause in Nyhavn.

The colours bounce off the water like a painting. I kept thinking how many artists must have stood here, brush in hand, trying to catch that perfect line where ochre meets cobalt.

It was a fresh, clear morning, and I was exploring one of Copenhagen’s most picturesque 17th-century districts.

I read an article that said a pencil can write 35 miles.

35 miles! I’m sure that can’t be true. 

But the idea got me thinking about how keen we are to judge our drawing efforts before we’ve had time to develop our skills.

Many people give up on drawing after just a few attempts, declaring, “I can’t draw” or “I have no natural talent.” way too early on in the actual drawing practice.

That’s like judging your fitness level after a week of walking around the block, so it’d be easy to do a couple of drawings that don’t quite work out.

Drawing, like any skill, takes time and practice to develop.

A method that can help is to look at a non-emotional record of progress. It can help you keep calm and not critically self-assess your work until you’ve done a much larger body of work.

In the beginner’s drawing course, I recommend hiding your first attempts in an envelope to look back on in the future. 

When progress in developing any skill is incremental, it can be helpful to have clear times to have a check-in on how things are going and to look back and see what has improved.

35 miles is a lot of shading; that’s 1,000s of contours and a bucket load of erasers!

My proposal in the last post was to try a personal New Year creative experiment.

Just one format, one medium, one subject.

I’ve been focusing on portrait structure, and anatomy with pencil on paper.

Morning Sketches from Jan 2025

Morning Sketches from Jan 2025

Morning Sketches from Jan 2025

There’s a whole story and a whole journey that would have come out of one pencil.

Not only do I remember the sketches that went well, but lots of smudging, erasing and relooking. I also remember how the sun was streaming in through the studio window when I sat down to do the third sketch and the croissant I was going to buy after my practice.

If you’re drawing with pen and ink, put a little pot on the side for empty ink cartridges. 

Keep a bin for used-up paint tubes – not to judge the work but to celebrate a dedication to practice. I think it’s a nice idea just to think in terms of evidence; every artist’s journey is made up of these small records.

Morning class,

I thought I’d share with you a little seascape sketch that I did the other day.

It’s filmed in real-time, so you can actually see how long I take and how my decision process works when drawing.

You’ll see moments when I pause and reconsider what pens to start with and what pens I end up finishing with. You also see me having a cup of tea throughout the sketch because sometimes, just having a brew will give you that little bit of contemplation time to decide what to focus on next.

If you haven’t got 10 minutes to watch it all, I’ve also made a shorter 60 seconds edited version on YouTube shorts (and a 90-second one on Instagram)

Watch along in real-time as I sketch the shoreline of Porthminster beach, St Ives, Cornwall

60-second version below:

Sketching Pens, from Left to Right: Pentel Aquash Pen, Lamy Safari Fountain Pen, Liquitex paint marker, Pentel brush pen, Muji 0.5mm gel pen.

Exploring the narrow cobbled streets of St Mawes, every turn uncovers a charming cottage or an absolutely stunning view. This small historic fishing village is nestled at the end of the Roseland peninsula on the south coast of Cornwall and is magical.

Natural stone, slate, and white lime-washed simplicity, so with pen in hand, I set about capturing some of St. Mawes architectural coastal doorways.