Every proper drawing school starts with still life and usually stays with it for at least one and a half to two years. There is a reason for that. Still life contains everything you need to learn in order to eventually move on to portraits and figure drawing. It is very simple: put three objects on a table in front of you and draw them. That’s a still life.

At the beginning, use simple objects: a cube, a cylinder, a sphere. Later you can move on to more difficult things: a coffee maker, complex glass forms, drapery, or basically anything you can find at home.

You don’t need to spend days or weeks drawing lines for hours, a month drawing circles, or endlessly drawing cubes from imagination. Everything you draw should be there in front of you. Not in a photograph, not as a 3D model, but in real life, sitting on the table in front of you.

If you get stuck on the cylinder, look up how to construct a cylinder online. Once you understand it, go back and continue drawing the bottle sitting on your table.

If you get stuck on shading a sphere, look it up in a book or online. Once you understand it, go back and continue drawing what you see.

That’s how you learn the fundamentals. You encounter a problem while drawing, learn what you need in order to solve that problem, and then immediately apply it to the object in front of you.

It’s really that simple.

Draw what you see.