Whether you have recently rediscovered an old artistic flame, or have been increasingly unfulfilled while grinding away for years and want to give in to your creative side, the work begins with honing your craft.
That's what separates the hobbyists from the greats, right?
The greats invest the time necessary to keep adding to their technical prowess and sharpening their creative eye. We just so happen to be fortunate to live in a time when you can learn just about anything you’d like and grow your skill-set for free online, in the comfort of your own home.
Go, internet!
We’ve thus compiled a list of the top 10 step-by-step YouTube art tutorials to get you on the road to your dream life as an artist.
These art tutorials are impressive for a couple of reasons:
The artists imparting their skills and knowledge with you are truly fantastic educators and they are delivering real value. Teaching is a hard thing to do and these creative minds are exceptional at it. They are entertaining and pleasant, all while delivering clear, coherent, and actionable step-by-step instructions. The videos range from about 10 minutes to 50 minutes.
These are well-established YouTube channels with millions of subscribers and views collectively. These artists are tried, tested & in-demand. That being so, there’s enough quality instruction on these art accounts to keep you busy for years doing a deep dive into endless tips, techniques, methods, and advice.
Before we go any further, just a quick heads up; some of these tutorials get into some pretty advanced techniques, but they clearly lay out the basic building blocks that will lead you into the more advanced drawing. Don't get stuck on the more advanced drawing if you are a beginner. Instead, just focus your energy on mastering the basics. When you're ready to move on, you'll have the more advanced drawing to shoot for.
You can follow these videos in order or feel free to jump around too.
Let's get started!
Tutorial #1
How to Draw a Hyper-Realistic Eye in Pencil
Darlene from Rapid Fire Art will grease your artistic chops in her tutorial on how to draw a super realistic eye in pencil. She is crisp, seamless in her delivery, easy to follow, and delivers high-quality instruction. The finished product is stunning!
Tutorial #2
10 Common Problems When Drawing a Face and How to Fix Them
Andrew, from Xabio Arts, is super engaging and very funny! I love this guy. Andrew is also a great teacher and makes the whole learning process incredibly enjoyable. Andrew will show you 10 common problems when drawing a face and how to fix them.
Tutorial #3
How to Draw and Shade Realistic Hands
If you didn't skip the first tutorial Darlene From Rapid Fire Art will be a familiar face. In this video, she will deliver a detailed step-by-step lesson on how to draw and shade realistic hands. You'll learn to draw a basic hand shape, how to make it look feminine, masculine, and wrinkly. The shading techniques in the video are awesome.
Tutorial #4
How to Draw Different Nose Shapes
Our next instructor is Jescia Hopper. Jescia will help you tackle another difficult facial feature to draw - the nose. She does a great job helping you build the common structure of six different types of noses from two different vantage points. After discussing structure, she completes the drawing and shading, then gets into the key features for each nose type.
Tutorial #5
How to Draw Faces from any Angle
Next up is Sinix Design. Sinix will present a short but extremely useful tutorial on his preferred method for drawing a face from various angles. This is a great lesson in strengthening your mind's eye to help visualize a subject from varying perspectives in three-dimensional space. Lots of great advice here.
Tutorial #6
More on Drawing Faces from Various Angles
Since drawing faces at different angles can be challenging, here is another method on the topic from Robert Marzullo. Robert will show you how to draw and divide the head into thirds. This allows you to place features and draw the head on an angle with more confidence.
Tutorial #7
Easy Anatomy: How to Draw Arms
We're back at Xabio Arts with Andrew for this tutorial on how to draw arms. The first part of this video is an ad basically, a sponsor for the channel, but Andrew is so entertaining that I even loved watching him plug his sponsor. :) After that's done, he gets down to business and teaches you an easy way to draw arms.
Tutorial #8
Drawing Fundamentals: Construction
Continuing on with arms and body, this tutorial takes the previous one even further with how to master the fundamental construction of arms and body. This is one part of a six-part series on the fundamentals of drawing to get you started from another fantastic instructor, Jazza. In this video, Jazza moves quickly through some advanced drawing after laying out the fundamental building blocks of the human form. If you're a beginner, you may want to first focus on the basics of construction in the early part of the video before moving on to drawing the body form in different positions and perspectives. Plenty here to keep you busy mastering your techniques.
Tutorial #9
How to Draw: Foreshortening with the Coil Technique
Foreshortening refers to the technique of depicting an object or human body in a picture so as to produce an illusion of projection or extension in space. This is an indispensable technique to master and to lead our lesson, we have an incredible artist, Sycra. Here, Sycra covers the 'coil technique' and how to use it when dealing with foreshortening.
Tutorial #10
'The drawing advice that changed my life'
Ok, this isn't really a tutorial. But I thought it was inspiring, relevant, and necessary for you to watch if you are someone who is ready to take a leap and reimagine your life doing what fulfills you, creating art. If you've been stuck or procrastinating about getting serious about your craft, this may be the clarification you've been waiting for. :) This video, courtesy of Struthless, has struck a nerve, achieving over a million views since being posted in January.
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