# Basic Skills / Getting Started with Drawing - review & insight | Gareth B. Davies Source: https://garethbdavies.com/course-insights/basic-skills-getting-started-with-drawing/ [← All courses](https://garethbdavies.com/course-insights/) Illustration & Drawing · Solid intro · Rated 8 /10 # Basic Skills / Getting Started with Drawing By Gareth B. Davies · Updated July 2026 Brent Eviston · Master Artist & Instructor Beginner · 261 min A structured 16-lesson foundation course that turns drawing into a repeatable skill-building routine rather than an innate gift, with real practice assignments attached. [Get a Free Month on Skillshare](https://skillshare.eqcm.net/c/3155494/298081/4650?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.skillshare.com%2Fclasses%2Fbasic-skills-getting-started-with-drawing%2F637385311) New to Skillshare? Your first month is free, enough to take this course at no cost. ## A slow, deliberate start built on repetition Brent Eviston's Basic Skills course opens with a single, unambiguous claim: drawing is not talent, it is a trainable skill, and the entire 261-minute course is built to prove that point through repetition rather than inspiration. The structure is a one-lesson-per-day model, each lesson pairing a short concept with a homework project, so the course reads more like a curriculum than a highlight reel. Lesson two spends real time just on how to hold a pencil and why the first marks of any drawing should be too light to matter, a point that gets reinforced constantly through the rest of the course rather than mentioned once and dropped. The middle stretch is where the actual technique lives. Circles and ovals are taught as a shoulder motion, not a wrist motion, drawn as several loose passes that coalesce into a usable shape rather than one careful attempt at a perfect line. Straight lines get the same treatment, framed from the start as angles (a horizontal is a zero-degree angle, a vertical is ninety) so that oblique lines later don't feel like a separate skill. The assignment attached to circles and ovals, a hundred of each varied in size and openness, is a genuine practice load, not a token exercise, and it signals early that the course expects work outside the video. ## Shapes as the organizing idea Everything before this point exists to feed into one recurring idea: any subject, no matter how complex, reduces to a handful of basic shapes, and a five-question routine (what shape, what axis, what size, what placement, relative to what) is the tool for finding them. This framework gets applied three times in demonstration, first on a scrub jay, then a botanical study of tulips and a calla lily, then a human figure using gesture lines and bending ovals. Watching the same process repeat across three very different subjects is the strongest teaching device in the course, since it makes the abstraction concrete instead of leaving it as a one-off explanation. The figure drawing section is honest about its own limits, noting plainly that it simplifies a process that in practice involves far more anatomy and measurement, which is a reasonable scope decision for a beginner course rather than a shortcoming. The botanical demo similarly explains why organic subjects tolerate more looseness than a face would, a genuinely useful piece of judgment that a beginner would not otherwise know to apply. ## Where it falls short The course is deliberately narrow. It never shades a drawing beyond a passing mention of shadow shape, never covers proportion measurement in depth, and treats the figure and still life demos as previews of later courses in the series rather than complete lessons in themselves. Anyone expecting a finished, rendered drawing by the end will be disappointed, since the entire course sits before shading and detail work even start. For a true beginner willing to do the practice, though, it delivers exactly what it promises: a habit of drawing lightly, a working method for breaking shapes down, and a clear on-ramp into the rest of the series. The standout The five-question shape-axis-size-placement framework, demonstrated first slowly then at speed on the scrub jay drawing, gives beginners a concrete mental checklist to run on any subject. ## What you will learn - · How to hold a pencil and build light, adjustable construction lines before committing to dark ones - · How to draw circles, ovals and straight lines using momentum from the shoulder rather than the wrist - · How to break any subject down into basic shapes (circles, ovals, rectangles, triangles) before adding detail - · A five-question process for analyzing a subject's shape, axis, size and placement on the page - · How the same shape-based approach extends to a bird, a botanical still life and a human figure - · Basic material choices (graphite vs oil-based colored pencil, newsprint vs archival paper, when to use an eraser) Best for: Total beginners who have never drawn seriously and want a structured, project-based routine rather than a loose collection of tips. Skip it if: Anyone with intermediate drawing experience already comfortable with construction lines and basic shape analysis, since the pacing and content will feel too elementary. Clarity of Instruction Engaging Teacher Organization of Lessons Helpful Examples [Get a Free Month on Skillshare](https://skillshare.eqcm.net/c/3155494/298081/4650?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.skillshare.com%2Fclasses%2Fbasic-skills-getting-started-with-drawing%2F637385311)