Challenge Your Drawing Skills: 40 Hard Things to Draw
You’ve been drawing for some time now, you have a regular sketchbook practice going, and maybe you are even starting to feel like you are proud of some of your drawings. First of all, high five yourself really hard (not too hard; you don’t want to injure your precious drawing hand.)
Now it’s time to challenge yourself a little to draw some really hard things.
You obviously don’t need to force yourself to only draw hard things – keep drawing fun and draw the things you love to draw. But sometimes you will want to push yourself out of your comfort zone a little and take on the challenge of more advanced drawings.
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Related: How to get better at drawing
Hard Things to Draw
Take the following ideas and run with them – you can either work your way down the list, or pick and choose what you want to try drawing. Here’s a little tip, though: the things you see on the list that you immediately want to ignore might be the things that advance your drawing skills the most.
People/Figures
Hands – Hands are notoriously hard to draw. In fact, sometimes you will see drawings of people that are wonderfully done except for these weird, mitt-like hands. (Guilty) It’s pretty funny, but super frustrating when you are the one drawing.
Practice drawing hands as often as you can, in all sorts of different poses.
Feet – Yep, more body extremities. But you don’t want to be the person who can draw hands like Durer, and then give your figures flipper-feet.
Noses straight on – Contrary to popular belief, noses don’t have outlines. When you get to that point that you start actually trying to draw what the human face looks like, you get to that point where you go to draw a nose and you realize how hard they are to draw.
The top 2 images are obviously illustrations, but they illustrate my point. Below them are some noses for you to stare at and enjoy the subtleties in shading.
Related: The best drawing paper for every medium
More Advanced Human Drawing Ideas
- Mouths
- Eyes – you have such a great combo of textures, reflections, and shapes when you draw eyes!
- Self portraits
- What you can see of your body when you look down at it
Animals
Animals can be hard to draw from life since they tend to move around a lot. Taking a trip to the zoo with your sketchbook is a fantastic exercise in drawing lots of different animals as they go about their day.
Start with seeking out the most active animals to draw so you can warm up with gesture drawings. Next, move onto animals that are sleeping or mostly still. The lines, shapes, colors, and textures you can find on animals is an endless source for great drawing practice!
Idea: Focus one zoo trip on lines, the next one on shading, the next on capturing animals in their environments in detail.
More Challenging Animal Drawing Ideas
- Animal fur
- Birds outside
- Isolated animal parts, i.e. legs, head looking straight at you, paws
- Draw animals from videos
This video is meant for small kids to get to know zoo animals, but you could give it a shot for animal drawing ideas – just pause it whenever you want to. Bonus: you get to learn how to say animal names in different languages.
Perspective
Perspective drawing is so cool when you first learn it. It is truly an eye-opener to learn how to draw objects that are further away or closer up, based on where you position them on the paper in relation to other objects!
Practicing perspective drawing techniques will give your brain so much information to apply to any drawing you do, and will definitely up your drawing skills.
Perspective Drawing Ideas
Buildings in a city – looking down a street or straight up, or at the intersection and looking into the corner of the buildings.
- Human lying down with their feet pointed straight at you
- Hands – looking at fingers coming at you
- View looking up at a tall sculpture or statue
- Corner of your room
Texture/Detail
Texture can be super hard to draw – think of the last time you tried to draw someone’s hair. Do you draw each strand? Draw it as a big helmet shape? Hair and other textured or highly-detailed items can be stressful to draw.
Luckily I’m here to agitate your stress and give you ideas for more drawing practice!
- Animal fur
- Human hair
- Lace
- Burlap
- Dried flowers
- Leather
Light/Shadow
Mastering drawing light and shadow can advance your drawing skills infinitely. Look around the space you are in right now, and take note of the way the light is hitting any objects you see. Now look at the shadows.
There are zillions of gradations of light and shadow that will hit everything you try to draw, so take your time with drawing shadows and light. Sometimes you will see obvious breaks in shadow and light, while other times it will be much more subtle and gradated.
- Chrome
- Chairs and tables
- Pillar candle
- Crumpled paper
- Eggs
- Flat white wall
- Human arm or leg
More Hard Things to draw
Draw from life! Challenging yourself to translate what you see in 3D to the 2D page is much trickier than copying a photo of something. Set up an object, a complicated still life, or even just draw what you see around the room.
With that said, you can by all means start practicing drawing objects from photos and then move on to real-life objects. Here are some challenging objects to draw, and the more you practice with these, the more advanced you will get at drawing.
- Glass
- Fabric
- Flatware
- Bikes
- Water
- Bones
- Bird feathers
- Rocks
Online Drawing Classes
There is no replacement for simply drawing, drawing, and drawing even more, every chance you get. However! You might be surprised at what you can learn from a good drawing course. Here are some online options:
Want something a little easier for when you are short on time or just warming up? Try these 100 one-word drawing prompts. Bookmark this page of drawing prompts so you never run out of ideas for what to draw.
