I've been wanting to learn how to draw for a while, but I don't know where to start. I've seen people work on iPad with Apple Pencil and it looks amazing. Is it expensive? Do you need to already have some artistic skills or can you learn from scratch?
The trick is that a beautiful picture on screen is 90% drawing skill, not 90% a cool tablet 😅 iPad with Apple Pencil really are great tools, but a beginner artist doesn't necessarily need them. You can totally start with something way cheaper - at least an entry-level graphics tablet or even just a simpler tablet with a stylus. The key here isn't the hardware, but what you'll be training every single day. Your hand won't learn to hold a line and feel proportions because of an expensive device.
You can absolutely start from scratch with zero skills. Nobody was born knowing how to draw - everyone learned. Start with basic exercises: hatching, lines, simple shapes (cubes, spheres, cylinders). Then move on to more complex figures and composition. The internet is full of free tutorials and lessons on digital painting for beginners, there are even special apps for practice.
If you seriously want to develop, then yeah, eventually it makes sense to invest in a proper tablet - just because it's more comfortable to work with and has more features. But that's not a starting requirement, it's more like a reward for drawing regularly for a couple months and realizing this isn't just a passing whim 🎨
I started with a cheap graphics tablet and simple software, and honestly, the difference between it and an iPad in terms of results wasn't that huge - at first. The thing I don't regret: after six months of regular practice, your hand gets used to it, your eye develops, and suddenly you understand exactly what you're missing in your tools. So my advice is - get something budget-friendly to start with, maybe even secondhand, and see if this is even going to be for you.
As for skills, you can learn to draw digitally while also learning the fundamentals in general (proportions, light and shadow, composition) - it's actually easier in some ways, because you can make tons of mistakes without feeling bad about the paper. YouTube is packed with free tutorials for beginners right now, and lots of teachers make their first lessons available specifically so you can try it out and see if you like it.
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