Your drawing glow up 🎨

What an AWESOME day to bring our design and drawing inspiration back to your inbox, and not just any, but… ALL THIS! Bird’s-eye-view drawings, quick design sketches, hand-drawn museum observations, quick changing nature impressions… all straight from my iPad, easily integratable into your own design workflow / life.

First: in the past few months, have you had a chance to sketch something? Even if it’s a messy 20-minute sketch?

In this newsletter, I want to give you a starter drawing pack that will blur the line between “no time / not ready / no tools etc.” and “wow, am I the one who sketched this?!”

And the reason why this SO matters is basically… this story below!

Back in 2018, when I got my first iPad 9.7 inch with 32GB of storage and was taking my first steps into digital drawing, my interior design school organized an excursion to Berlin for art and design exhibitions. Of COURSE I took my iPad with me because sketching was a MUST on that trip (our professor, a renowned architect who had worked in Paris and NYC, always encouraged us to make quick sketching part of every design project. And to pass that Berlin excursion, we literally had to fill THE ENTIRE SKETCHBOOK during the trip).

I checked into my Airbnb with a view of the Fernsehturm and got really cozy and excited because not only was it a city I deeply loved (and still do), but the Airbnb itself was SO cool - spacious, stylish, minimalistic. I had one day before my peers arrived, so I decided to quickly sketch my room on my iPad as a memory.

Expectation: open Procreate (the app we draw in, remember?), pick the perfect digital pencil, and 20 minutes later have that stylish architectural sketch I was used to creating on paper.

Ha.
Haha.
Hahaha.
What a naive girl.

NONE of the brushes felt right. NONE of the functions made any sense (the story of me not having a clue where the eraser was… and instead creating a new layer on top and painting over the mistake with the background color… is a perfect example).

And my perspective skills… well, I’ll better show you my sketch:

You know that feeling of disappointment when you’re SO excited to draw something in real life, on the go, like all those plein-air artists only to immediately doubt your skills, blame the absence of talent, and swear you’ll never try again because “it will never get better”?

Well… that’s exactly how I felt. So I switched to sketching a fashion figure instead because I was inspired by Garance Doré back then and her minimalistic fashion sketches, so I picked a brush that kind of resembled that.
But when you’re all alone… what do you do THEN?

This isn’t going to happen to you, because here are the exact 2 brushes that will help you capture your ideas and surroundings quickly, fun, and efficiently:

Pencil / contours: use Clean Sketch by Jimmy (free brush set → HERE)

Markers: not free but genius → HERE

And as for actually learning how to draw… you know you have me ;)

My drawing tutorials, step by step, will teach you how to Draw, with the capital D: quick sketches on the go, interior drawings of your design concepts, and even those bird’s-eye-views (which my clients seem to love most).



>> Learn to draw HERE.

And if you haven’t chosen the right iPad for drawing yet, start with this ebook → it includes a whole chapter on choosing the right iPad for your needs. (Had I found something like this earlier, I would’ve avoided buying an iPad mini - SO uncomfortable for sketches on the go because your hand constantly floats in the air and the canvas is just too small.) Inside the guide, I explain everything in simple language - no tech jargon, we’re creatives here, myself included :D

>> Get your guide HERE.

Until the next newsletter, and…

with big drawing energy,
Anna at @andshedrawsbig