5 Common Mistakes to avoid when Drawing

Bec Watson 14/11/2025 Bec's Blog 0

When we start out learning something new, our progress often doesn’t follow a steady incline, but instead can feel more like climbing a mountain, sometimes making great improvement, while other times we feel like we plateau. At times like this, we may have become bound by our errors, not knowing how to find a way out.

Here are 5 common mistakes people make when drawing and how to correct them.

1. Looking at your drawing more than the subject.

In order to draw recognisable representations of your subject, you must really learn to look . Obvious right? But everyone when starting out tends to look a lot at their own paper, rather than the actual thing they are drawing. For this reason, we need to train ourselves to look much more at the subject. One exercise that can help is to try a 5 minute sketch, by only looking at the subject, not your paper at all! It’s scary and the results will be wobbly to say the least, but it warms you up to really see in detail the object that is before you. Observation is key!

2. Holding pencil too tight

Many of us when starting out tend to hold the pencil with a fairly tight grip, partly because of practised habit in the way we hold a pencil to write and perhaps partly due to nerves. Whatever the reason, the result is that our drawings lack a looseness with each pencil stroke feeling very deliberate, whether it is in the right place or not! Try holding your pencil a little further away from the tip to release some of that tension. That way you will relax, as will your art!

3. Leaning too heavily for initial sketches

We all have different pressures in which we apply pencil to paper. Heavy or light, neither is wrong (and indeed both are necessary), but in order to begin your drawing, you will want to make some marks that can be rubbed out. A common mistake I see people making is to commit to a definite line that may not be correct, but is hard then to erase. Practice drawing lines on paper, lifting pressure as the line travels. Do fill an a4 paper with these lines to train your hand. When you are used to drawing lightly, you will feel more confident to apply these lines to a drawing.

4. Too many details, too quickly

I see this all the time! Someone launches into a portrait or still life and they are so keen to get it looking “good” that they start to fill in all that fancy detail in one area, only to find that the overall shape is wrong and they don’t want to change it. Get the fundamentals right at the start with loose light lines, before getting bogged down in the particulars. I personally like to leave the eyes of animals or humans to last, as a final piece in the jigsaw that makes the drawing come alive!

5. Compare and despair!

Oh if i could wave a magic wand over so many of my students (and myself) to free them from this bind! Comparing your work to others in a negative sense is so demoralising. Yes, others will have more experience than you. Yes, theirs may look different. But please remember that you are on your own journey of development. The only person you should compare yourself to is you! Of course, it can be helpful to learn from others and consider seeking their advice in order to improve your own work, but please don’t despair. When you see someone else’s work that you feel is ‘better’ than yours, why not first think of 3 things about your own that have been successful. Then pick 2 things that the other person has done well (you might like the way they blended an area, or used some interesting marks). If it feels right for you, jot them down as notes that you will consider in your next drawing. And then congratulate yourself as you have just learned something and made another couple of steps up that mountain.

And don’t forget to stop and enjoy the view!