[melling]

An iPad Pro with a Pencil seems like it would provide an endless sketchbook for someone who can already draw or paint.

My question is what's a good way for someone with zero ability to develop these abilities? Getting ProCreate, the iPad Pro, and the Pencil is the easy part. Developing a little bit of drawing skill is a big hurdle.

[Mithaldu]

Disclaimer: Not an artist myself, however i have learned much of the basics and am friends with many artists (e.g. http://kaceym.deviantart.com/ ) who earn their daily bread with commissions and have heard plenty about how they progressed.

The best way to develop them is, as with any physical skill: Basics, basics, basics. One doesn't become a master carpenter without hammering in thousands of nails.

This means, before telling you what to do, i need to warn you to not get too emotionally involved with any given piece. A day where you did 20 sketches in 5 hours will bring you forward. A day where you spent 10 hours on one piece holds you back. (At least at the start.) Don't bother with colors. Learn geometry, projection, proportions, lighting first. Colors only help to hide mistakes. Once you know all these things in and out, that's when it's time to start breaking rules.

Lastly, look up the books on drawing technique by Burne Hogarth and Andrew Loomis.

[jcl]

If you want to learn to draw from life, the biggest hurdle is learning to interpret visual signals directly -- what artists refer to as "learning to see". Your brain naturally wants to turn visual input (edge, color, pattern) into higher-level concepts ("house", "nose", "cat", etc.), which is wonderful for general survival but unhelpful when this interpretive step inserts itself in the path from your eyes to your pencil.

However, there are a variety of exercises you can do to learn to see low-level visual input over higher-level interpretations, like copying images upside-down, following a visual edge with both eye and pencil, using a viewfinder or grid to narrow attention, measuring angles/distances between landmarks, moving attention to "negative space", etc.

You can find these kinds of exercises in most life drawing books. I particularly like "Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain", as it's structured for independent study, it has a focus on quickly producing results for absolute novices, and it has a scientific bent -- although anything it says about physical neurological structure should be taken with a grain of salt.