"Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain" by Edwards is a good introduction to drawing. I think in particular it is a good explanation of how much of drawing is learning to look at the world, and exercises to improve your skills of looking at things. One of the big takeaways from this book and other drawing courses I have taken is that once you learn to draw what you see, nothing is particularly easier or harder to draw; in every case you are drawing what you see. The feeling of difficulty in drawing a particular object often comes from trying to parse it into visual symbols, then draw those symbols, rather than seeing the object as a pattern of light and reproducing that on the paper.
This does sort of beg the question though: how do you draw things that don't exist?
Everything (or, almost everything) I personally care about drawing is sci-fi or fantasy, and sort of the whole point of it is that it doesn't actually exist, and therefore I can "see" in a physical sense only my own drawings or those by other artists.
I generally make abstract or surrealist pieces. I don't know where ideas come from, but I do a certain amount of "making things up as I go along"
Realistically, though, sci-fi and fantasy objects are based on objects we have in everyday life. If you look at sci-fi through the years, they have the era's aesthetic: The lines of 50's sci-fi are different from the 80's appeal, for example. And this is where you start to draw the imaginary stuff.
Sci-fi ships? Based off of a combination of naval ships and planes. Get reference photos and use these to guide you, adding and taking away as you see fit. Plant life on another planet? Use plants and fungus from earth as your guide. Again, get reference photos and use these to guide you, changing what you like. Want an easy way to start something more surrealist? Find 3 unrelated reference photos and combine them into one image - use a digital art program to combine them if you'd like.
Note the heavy use of reference photos: I use them whenever I want something shaped in a specific way. If I want a goldfish in a space portal, well, I look up a picture of a goldfish. If I'd like koi instead, I look it up.
I also recommend the Betty Edwards book. It took me from stickmen to realistic drawings of chairs and hands :-)
It also makes you appreciate paintings.
Curiously the book from the TFA is doing almost the exact opposite of what DotRSotB recommends. The former is about parsing things into shapes while the latter is like tracing from an imaginary glass in front of you.
That book temporarily broke my brain. I had trouble turning off that mode of seeing. Possible that my undiagnosed-at-the-time ADHD was finding the shapes of people more interesting than what they were saying. 10/10 would recommend ;)
I've seen this recommended, then criticized, back and forth for ages. But your description makes it sound practical as a beginner, so I think I'll just finally check it out. thanks!
