You can be lucky enough to be born with the ability to draw, but drawing is also a learnable skill that practice improves and makes perfect-ish. Learning to draw is a very rewarding thing to do in your spare time. It can be an exciting and creative process, but also a relaxing way to destress and encourage mindfulness.

Whether you're 15 or 50, there's a lot to be said for following online tutorials to take you from zero to sketching hero. We've found seven superb online resources that offer just that — free drawing lessons to teach you an amazing new skill.

1. Arty Factory

Learn to draw all sorts of things on Arty Factory.Credit: arty factory

Arty Factory is one to watch as a growing resource of free art tutorials. The ad-supported site offers free content in three main areas; free art lessons, free art appreciation information, and free design lessons. The art lessons cover topics like pencil drawing, how to draw animals, ancient Eygptian art tutorials, and perspective drawing. The art appreciation offers easy-to-digest chunks of info about the art of different eras, movements, styles, and techniques. The design lessons encompass color theory, graphic design, typography, and more.

2. Ctrl+Paint

Ctrl+Paint is a free learning resource dedicated to the basics of digital painting. It is primarily a video-based resource, with lots of brief clips covering all aspects of digital painting. While the overall focus is on digital painting, there is a lot of content relating to drawing specifically, with an entire series of tutorials relating to traditional drawing, as well as composition basics, and more advanced drawing skills. This site also has video content to help you explore your mental approach to making artwork, offering advice about finding inspiration, and critiquing your own work.

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3. Drawing Coach

This great free site is run by a creative director of a computer game company whose aim is to help anyone go from stick-man skill level to fully-fledged artist. There's a lot of encouragement and positive messages which is great for anyone who lacks confidence. There are lots of tutorials to work through, in categories such as cartoon animals and people, drawing portraits and caricatures, figure and perspective drawing, and more.

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4. Drawing Now

Drawing Now is a great site for kids to get started on learning how to draw. This site offers thousands of free how to draw, step-by-step, easy drawing lessons. These are basic lessons showing you how to draw cartoon-style animals and characters. Each drawing tutorial has a video that shows you the sketching steps. You can change the speed at which the videos play to suit the pace of your drawing. You can then either follow the instructions online or print the step-by-step tutorial pages and work in your own time offline.

5. Easy Peasy and Fun

Credit: easy peasy and fun

This is another child-friendly option. Easy Peasy and Fun offers a wide range of free printables for kids, and has an entire "How to Draw" section that offers sweet, simple printables for younger children to practice their drawing skills. As you'd expect, there are a lot of animal-themed options, but also bugs, flowers, and shapes too. Easy Peasy and Fun also offers free seasonal how-to-draw printouts, so check these out around special occasions and holidays.

6. Proko

Credit: proko

Proko offers professional, paid drawing courses but there are enough free drawing tutorial videos on the site to warrant a mention on this list, and to recommend a visit. Proko represents a collection of artists headed up by Stan Prokopenko, an artist and teacher, who hosts many of the free videos. This site takes you from drawing basics, such as basic shading and three-dimensional effects, through figure drawing, portrait and head drawing, anatomy drawings, and caricatures. The videos are good quality and quite often start with a basic tutorial before going into more advanced techniques.

7. The Drawing Website

This site is from 19-year industry professional animator and storyboard artist Luis Escobar. It offers various tutorials that are designed to take you from sketching a stick man to being able to produce decent comic strips. The lessons are divided into two levels, level zero is for absolute beginners, while you can choose to jump in at level one if you have some drawing knowledge and experience. The lessons are quite wordy, so are not suited to younger artists, but they offer incredibly interesting advice from a top-level pro.

Drawingconclusions (sorry)

All of these online destinations will help you learn how to draw. Some are more suited towards children. Drawing Now and Easy Peasy and Fun are ideal starting out points for mini artists. If you'd like to learn comic-book style drawing then The Drawing Website is a recommended free service to help you do just that. Anyone who is more interested in drawing from a fine art point of view, do visit Proko. This artist-led service offers some high-quality video tutorials.

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