What do I Struggle to Draw?

Every artist has strengths and weaknesses. A lot of us avoid drawing the things we’re bad at. In this post, you can learn all about the things I find difficult to draw, and how I’m working on each one!

Hands

I think every artist (or at least most of them) struggles with drawing hands. For the longest time I didn’t bother even trying to draw them. But eventually I started studying references on Pinterest and working on their anatomy. I’m still not an expert, but I do think I’ve improved.

Males

I find it really hard to draw male body types and faces. They tend to turn out stiff and expressionless. This struggle is more common than I thought. I’ve always drawn female characters, so I’m much more used to that. Another similar struggle I face is male clothes! I can never think of interesting outfits to put my male characters in.

Above are 2 attempts at drawing men. Reference

One thing that’s helped me a lot with this is DrawingWiffWaffles videos. She’s talked a lot about her difficulties drawing guys and has even made a few videos studying references and sharing tips. If you share this struggle, I highly recommend watching them! She is also the one who got me into drawing Spiderman. I used to draw him a lot in my sketchbook to practice different poses. This also really helped with drawing male body types.

Baggy Clothes

Again, a common struggle. When I was much younger, I would really overdo the wrinkles on clothes. Soon after, I stopped drawing them altogether. This is why I really prefer to draw fitted clothes on my characters. I find that when I draw baggy clothing, it looks stiff and unnatural. This isn’t something I’m focusing on right now. My first priority is to improve the fluidity of the actual character. Once I’ve worked more on that, I’ll start working on drawing better clothes.

This is a sketchbook page where I practiced drawing the wrinkles in clothes! My favourite is the one on the top right.

Backgrounds

I almost never draw backgrounds. If you go through my Instagram, you’ll see a lot of the art has either no background or just a solid colour painted in to keep it from looking empty.

It’s not a conscious decision. I always spend a lot of time on the foreground and by the time I’m done with that, I just don’t feel like doing a background. I also prefer to do paintings in one sitting, so I rarely go back and add one in. I’ve been told the importance of backgrounds from a lot of art teachers, so I should probably start doing them!

Side note: I went through my old sketchbooks to find examples of my background drawings, and I couldn't find any. That proves I really never draw them!

And there you have it: the 4 things I struggle most with drawing. I'm working on each of them and hope to improve in the future. Comment down below! What do you find hard to draw? Do you have any tips for me?

Thanks for reading! I hope you enjoyed this article. Remember, I release new ones every week. Before you go, don't forget to check out my shop!