Building Confidence With Your First Sketches: The Honest, Ugly Birth of Every Artist
Let’s get one thing out of the way: your first sketches are going to look like absolute shit. If you’re not prepared for that, put the pencil down and go take up stamp collecting. Stamps never judge you, and you can’t ruin their tiny faces with your trembling lines. But if you’re here for the long haul—hungry, restless, ready to grind until your fingers ache and your erasers beg for mercy—keep reading, because I’m going to crack this thing wide open, bones and all.
The First Sketch is a Blood Sacrifice—Not a Masterpiece
Nobody, and I mean nobody, picks up a pencil and draws the Mona Lisa on Day One. Your first sketch will look like a drunk raccoon with a caffeine addiction and a shaky hand tried to copy a photo of your grandma. And that’s exactly how it should be. That awkward, ugly, lopsided mess? That’s you, raw and unfiltered, staring down the barrel of your own insecurity and daring it to blink first.
Let me spell it out for you: every artist starts at the bottom of the pit. Not on the first rung of the ladder, not even on the floor, but in the dark, in the dirt, chewing on gravel. Real confidence comes from surviving that crawl, not skipping it.
Step One: Lower Your Standards—No, Lower
This is the part nobody wants to hear. You’ve seen those TikTok “glow-ups” where some 19-year-old shows a scribble from 2018 and then, BAM, paints a photo-realistic eye with a tear reflecting the galaxy. What they don’t show you is the hundreds—hell, thousands—of “between” drawings that looked like the eye had been punched by existential dread.
Here’s your first mission:
Stop worshipping perfection. Throw away any expectation of nailing it. Right now. Your job for the first fifty sketches isn’t to make art—it’s to build callus. Every line you hate, every awkward nose, every weird hand, is a layer of armor against your inner critic. Confidence isn’t the absence of fear, it’s the numbness you develop by wading through it so often it loses its sting.
Your Only Goal: Finish the Damn Page
Forget “good.” Forget “bad.” Your job is to fill the page. You want a survival hack? Try this:
Grab a cheap-ass sketchbook. Nothing fancy—if you’re precious with it, you’ll freeze up.
Give yourself a time limit. Ten minutes, twenty.
Don’t lift the pencil. Don’t stop, don’t erase, don’t bitch.
Fill that paper until you run out of space or time.
Close the book.
Repeat.
You’re not sculpting marble here; you’re shoveling coal into the furnace. You need volume, not diamonds.
Ingredient Hack: The Ugly Sketch Ritual
Let me teach you the “Ugly Sketch Ritual,” a personal favorite from my starving-artist days:
Pour yourself the worst cup of coffee you can stomach. Trust me, you’ll be too busy scowling at your paper to notice the taste.
Set a timer—ten minutes, no more, no less.
Draw one object in your room. Do it fast. Don’t look at the paper more than you have to. Stare at the object, let your hand wander like a lost drunk at a midnight diner.
When the timer goes off, take your sketch and deface it. Scribble devil horns, write the word “failure” across the top, whatever. Ritual humiliation. This is important. It’s not precious. It’s not untouchable. You own it.
Next page, next day, do it again.
Sound insane? Good. This is the sort of insanity that builds immunity to fear. You kill the preciousness of every page, and you free your hand to take risks.
Why Your First Sketches Suck (and Why That’s a Good Thing)
Biology lesson, kid: your brain is a stubborn bastard. For years, it’s been processing the world in three dimensions—recognizing faces, reading light, interpreting shapes. Now you’re telling it to translate all that into a flat, two-dimensional scribble with a stick of graphite. Of course your first attempts are trash. Your brain literally doesn’t know how to drive this thing yet.
It’s like learning to walk on stilts while juggling torches over a pit of hungry alligators. Of course you’re going to fall. Of course it’s going to hurt. That pain is the tuition you pay to become someone who gets it.
The only way to get through it? You guessed it: Do it anyway. Draw badly, draw often, and draw ugly. Don’t draw for Instagram. Don’t draw for praise. Draw to survive.
Survival Strategies for the Perpetually Insecure
Let’s talk weapons for your arsenal:
Reference, Reference, Reference:
Stop pretending you can draw a hand from memory. Michelangelo used references. You aren’t better than Michelangelo. Have a mirror, your own hand, and a pile of Google images on tap at all times.
The Sketch Dump:
Keep a folder—physical or digital—called “The Graveyard.” Every time you finish a sketch, toss it in there and don’t look back. Once a month, dig up the corpses. You’ll see improvement you never noticed in the grind.
Public Humiliation (aka Growth Spurts):
Post your stuff. Yes, even the bad stuff. Especially the bad stuff. There’s nothing like a little daylight and shame to burn off the baby fat. Just don’t let the trolls live in your head rent-free. They’re cowards with no pencils.
The Line Economy Game:
Try drawing with as few lines as possible. It’ll look like crap at first, but you’ll learn which lines matter and which ones are just nervous squiggles.
The “F#%k It, Next” Mentality:
As soon as you start agonizing over a drawing—when it goes from practice to performance—slam the sketchbook shut and walk away. Go do pushups. Make a sandwich. Come back later, and start a new one. Your best work happens when you don’t care if you fail.
From Sketchbook Terror to Relentless Practice Machine
When you walk into an art store and see those rows of pristine, untouched sketchbooks, don’t be seduced. Buy the ugliest, cheapest one you can find. You want to fill it with garbage. Make it your mission to draw so much ugly, awkward, cringe-worthy stuff that by page 50 you’re immune to embarrassment. By page 100 you’re starting to see shapes, gesture, even a little beauty in the chaos. By page 300 you’ve built a backbone, not just a portfolio.
Confessions From the Trenches
You think you’re the only one who rips out pages? Who hides their early drawings in a drawer, afraid someone will find them and laugh? Please. I still have a file marked “DO NOT OPEN—BURN WHEN DEAD” full of mutant dog sketches, noses that look like malformed carrots, and anime eyes drawn in my “what even are eyelashes?” era.
But here’s the truth—every single “real” artist you admire did the same thing. They just burned their sketchbooks before you ever saw them, or (if they’re honest) they drag them out once in a while to remind themselves how far they’ve come. If you’re lucky, one day you’ll look back and laugh at how stubborn you were, and how those clumsy first lines were the start of everything good.
Bonus Hack: Steal From Yourself
When you draw something that almost works—a half-decent hand, a curve that feels right, a weird but interesting face—circle it. Later, flip back through and redraw it, only bigger and with intent. Every scrap is a stepping stone.
What Confidence Actually Looks Like
Let’s kill a myth: confidence isn’t drawing like a god from the start. It’s showing up again tomorrow, knowing you’ll suck a little less. It’s knowing you’ll keep making mistakes and having the stones to make them anyway. Real confidence is dragging your battered ego to the table and saying, “I know this will be ugly, but it’s mine.”
You build it. Line by line. Ugly as hell and proud of it.
Ready to Start? Here’s Your Real First Assignment
Find a pen or pencil and a stack of printer paper. Not a sketchbook, not your iPad—just loose, disposable sheets.
Pick a subject. Anything. Your hand, a shoe, the moldy coffee mug on your desk.
Set a timer for 5 minutes.
Draw fast. No erasing. No second-guessing.
When the timer is up, grab a Sharpie and write the date, your mood, and a single word describing the experience.
Toss it in a pile.
Do this every day for 30 days.
Don’t look back until the month is up.
At the end, lay them all out on the floor. Find the thread. The one thing you do better, the one thing you understand now that you didn’t before.
Pat yourself on the back. You survived. Now do it again.
Confidence isn’t a feeling. It’s a byproduct of getting your ass kicked, over and over, until you learn how to take a punch and grin.
Welcome to the fight, rookie.