40 Free Tutorials on Advanced Drawing Techniques
The traditional form of drawing and sketching is a highly sought after skill. Develop your personal drawing abilities by following this collection of 40 great tutorials on advanced drawing techniques, including general theory, useful tips, comic inspired art and some methods for transforming your creations into digital format.
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1. How to Draw a Car
Use a range of pencil drawing techniques to create an American classic, the Corvette. This tutorial from DueysDrawings.com covers the process from roughing out the initial outline through to shading with a range of tones.
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2. How to Draw Hair With Naughty-Kitty
Follow this tutorial by Naughty Kitty to gain some useful tips on recreating Manga inspired hair in a range of styles.
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3. How to Draw Cute Characters
Learn the tips and techniques in this Manga tutorial to draw a cute female character, paying particular attention to body language and facial features.
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4. Tips for drawing hands
Discover a range of tips for drawing hands, generated from the artist’s own experiences. Techniques include foreshortening, drawing nails and finger shapes.
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5. How to Draw a Ninja
Start by sketching out the wireframe skeleton and work through this tutorial to produce a dynamic ninja character ready for action.
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6. Traditional Sketch Rendering
Swedish designer Mikael Lugnegard shows us his techniques for creating a traditional sketch render of a BMW car concept.
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7. How to Create a Three Color Wolf Skull in Illustrator
Use a Wacom tablet directly in Adobe Illustrator to trace a reference photo and shade the illustration with a range of hatch lines.
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8. Inking and Coloring the Comic Strip The Brads
Follow tips from cartoonist Brad Colbow to discover how to create your own comic strip.
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9. Drawing the Human Eye
Pay close attention to the anatomical structure of the eye and follow tips in this tutorial to produce a highly realistic sketch of a human eye.
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10. Eye drawing tutorial by Lianne
Follow this tutorial from Lianneissa.com to draw a detailed female eye from scratch.
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11. A Pseudo-Sugar Skull: From Start to Finish.
Create a highly detailed sugar skull illustration by following this expert tutorial, with details on the process from sketch to final digital design.
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12. Comic Book Style Graphic Design.
Discover useful tips and techniques while following this design process of drawing a stunning comic book style character.
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13. From Sketch to Vector Illustration.
Follow these tips on producing impactful digital creations starting from a hand drawn sketch.
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14. Character Drawing.
Follow this artist’s personal recommendations and tips on creating your own characters.
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15. Create Your Own Impressive Cartoon Character.
Create your own character by following these tutorial steps, starting with a skeletal framework to build the cartoon features.
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16. Sketching Figures with Lines.
Although the site requires an account, this extensive collection of tutorials is extremely useful for anyone looking to improve their drawing skills.
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17. How to Draw a Fashion Figure.
Watch this simple video tutorial to learn how to use existing reference imagery to trace a fashion inspired sketch.
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18. Figure drawing video tutorial.
View this figure drawing video lesson with Matthew Achambault to gain a useful insight into life figure drawing.
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19. How to Draw a Head.
This useful series of video tutorials cover some highly useful tips for drawing a human head.
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20. The Dragon Tutorial.
Pick up some techniques in this dragon inspired tutorial that can be put into practice in your own fantasy drawings.
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21. Leather Wings.
Aimed directly at drawing wings, pick up some ideas and techniques for drawing realistic wing frameworks.
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22. The Human Body.
Learn the stages of drawing dummy frameworks in order to produce realistically proportioned figures.
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23. Pencil Sketching.
Including a range of theory and practical advice, read this article to gather together some interesting nuggets of knowledge.
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24. Drawing Hair in Pencil.
Drawing hair is hard work, but these useful tips you’ll be creating extremely realistic hair in your drawings in no time.
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25. Drawing Hands Tutorial.
A common difficulty in pencil drawing is the recreation of hands, pick up some great tips and techniques from this overview.
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26. Drawing Detailed Hair.
Follow this multi-part tutorial for more tips on creating highly realistic hair on your subjects.
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27. Myth’s Dragon Tutorial.
This artist breaks down the process of drawing a fantasy creature into easily followable steps.
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28. General Sketching Tips.
Learn various sketching techniques in this tutorial, with focus on creating a great looking character.
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29. Proportions.
These five techniques will help get to grips with proportions in your drawings, an excellent roundup with plenty of tips.
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30. Clothing Tutorial.
Dress your characters in a range of clothing by following these practical drawing tips.
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31. Step by Step Comic Book Creation.
View the process of creating an awesome comic book layout in this article, starting with sketching and moving on through the inking and digital processes.
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32. Inking Tutorial.
Read through some interesting theory and pick up some highly useful tips in this multi-part inking tutorial.
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33. A Look at Chibi Art.
Learn about the Japanese form of art named Chibi, and how to create Chibi inspired characters with this quick list of tips.
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34. How to Draw Caricatures: The 5 Shapes
Pick up a range of tips in this article highlighting the basic theory and 5 shapes of caricature design.
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35. Character Design Lesson
Watch this character design video tutorial along with other lessons in the series to pick up more useful design tips.
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36. Drawing Manga Clothing
Discover some interesting tips for drawing Manga inspired clothing and fabric.
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37. Manga Strip Tutorial
View the process of creating a complete Manga comic strip using traditional tools.
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38. Facial Aging
Log in and learn tips and techniques to accurately draw people of various ages in this detailed tutorial.
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39. How to Draw Ears
View this great collection of slides to learn useful tips to accurately draw the human ear.
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40. Pencil Shading Techniques
Learn the various techniques of creating tone with this roundup of pencil shading methods.
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By Chris Spooner
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Great Tutorials
Wooowww!! Just what I needed to get started on drawing, thank you!!!
Great article. Absolutely outstanding. Makes me want to start drawing again, I kinda’ lost touch when I started programming.
Very good article! congratulations! Makes me to start to drawing too!
Thanks a lot. Very useful. I tried to build up such a drawing tutorials collection myself to always have it at hand. But your collection is way richer.
Great collection ! A very nice selection of different drawing techs – really nice to get some “root” tutorials ^^ so appriciated ! Thumbs ups, Chris Spooner and Vectortuts!
wow, awesome collection
great, great
Wow, great collection of resources.
Nice job Chris!
Reminds me that I should spend more time with a pencil and paper instead of a screen and wacom.
Thanks for those links!
This is a really nice collection , it gets me in the mood to start doing some drawing
I like 14 and 38 a lot. This is a great post!
Score. This is good stuff PSDtuts!
I realize this is a vector tut. However, most of these posts belong in a psdtuts. Am I mistaken? I guess you’ve got to put it in one or the other.
I recently found that Sugar Skull tutorial going through some older Go Media tuts, and I loved my final product. I’ll be trying some of these others out because I need to learn to sketch better.
As for these belonging on PSDTuts, sketching is the first step in vector tutorials a lot of the time, so sketching tutorials make sense here.
Thanks for these usefull tuts ! Great work.
Very nice. it’s hard to find good drawing tutorials like this
Great list and great job
Nice rundown, Chris.
I’m always coming across sketches such as these during my donders around DeviantArt and wishing something could give me a little kick start into drawing my own. Some fantstic resources for doing just that.
Alex | Zen Elements
wow, great list christ. all tutorial here that i’ve searching before!
thanks and good job christ!
Nice collection of drawing tutorials. I’m honored that you have one of mine posted, #1. I appreciate the exposure. Thank you.
wow. really sweet list. this is exactly what I was looking for, and something I’d love to see some more of around Vector.tuts(using the new syntax…kinda liking it
). So much of good vector drawing starts from a sketch, and these are the kind of things i want to learn.
Simply Awesome… Thanks…
Great List, save time to find
who are you people. I think I work with you.
I have seen some of these tutorials.
There’s a lot to see!
I’m making a personal work using drawing. I’ll use the tutorials for the next drawing works! Thanks a lot!
Awesome! I never even thought of learning drawing techniques like this. great idea!
Very good
Wonderful list and fantastic works!!!
Great list of Tutorials. This will really help with my inking techniques. Thanks!
Just what I need to enhance my skills with Illustrator
OMG THANK YOU I’ve bookmarked this already!
Cool post man, thanks for putting it together! Got a little drawing tutorial post myself over here:
http://www.drawninblack.com/2008/11/20/how-to-draw-a-skull-50-how-tos-tutorials-studies-photo-references-videos-and-inspirational-skull-illustrations/
Enjoy and keep drawing!
- Lee
drawninblack.com
This is a great list of tutorials!
Thank you for sharing out all these very useful tutorial. Good job!
Man, this is a great site. The drawings are incredible.
awesome!! this is really usefull.
thank you
Amazing tutorials…..
Great job!
hurrayyy illustrator!
THX everyone!
Thanks for the tutorials. I really like the Facial Aging. I have a hard time drawing distinguishable faces.
Fantastic Resources
Great tutorials, they look absolutely great and helpful!
fabulous tutorials! thank you for compiling them!
This is fabulous! What a resource you have here!
I have artist friends to share this with and I’ve already bookmarked.
This is the type of education that could make kids EXCITED about learning.
facinating
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injected into user input!”)
fantastic dude!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
great tutorials! fantastic!
This is incredible – thank you
Thanks, i’ts grat.
Wonderful tutorials. Just the thing to try drawing some things I’ve never tried before.