Hello! professional design manager and illustrator here. :)

So glad you added the example of the scientific illustration - funnily enough, I strongly suspect that was made using vector illustrations which is a slightly different method than your vanilla 'draw in ink, color the shapes' mindset for mediums.

It almost feels like you're asking two separate questions here - (a) how best to improve your observational skills, and (b) what medium/tools should you optimize for. The good news - yes, absolutely you can learn the observation skills digitally; that was pretty much my path (you can see my work on the profile link) - it's rare when I touch a physical piece of paper for drawing.

(b) tools-wise, it sounds like you already have a good idea of where you want to go there, whether it be a tablet or ipad. There's pros and cons to both and it wholly lies on what you are most comfortable with as well what works best for your setting. rule of thumb is if you're spending most of your time at a desk, it doesn't hurt to invest in a larger tablet, but if you're spending most of your drawing time on the go, ipads are invaluable.

(a) to beef up on the observation skills, there's more than a few youtube series of videos that'll walk you through the basics of shape, form, color, line. Proko's series may work well with you given he also uses digital art -- https://www.youtube.com/channel/UClM2LuQ1q5WEc23462tQzBg

If you're long on cash and short on time, mentorship with other artists is also a thing to level up much faster and in a more focused manner. I've invested some time with Jayd (https://www.jaydaitkaci.com/services.html) which was an investment I'd do all over again.

Happy to answer any follow up questions!

https://drawabox.com/ https://www.ctrlpaint.com/

drawabox.com is incredible - started it a while back, really should get back into it.

I had a Moleskine and a pen. Now I have an iPad Mini and Procreate (plus Notability for notes). I have a metal nib and a paper-textured screen protector. Those make all the difference.

An iPad with Procreate just feels natural. You slowly pick up gestures and discover nifty features, but you can also _just draw_. Drawings auto-save, and appear in a nice gallery. It feels like flipping through the page of a notebook. I can't overstate how natural the whole thing feels, especially with a nice screen protector and a metal nib.

I rarely leave the house without my iPad. I use it to make the illustrations on allaboutberlin.com, and to take notes when I meet clients.

By comparison, Windows drawing software required opening, editing and saving files. You could not close the app without going through every "Save changes?" dialog. The apps were made for desktop computers and had tiny icons and piss poor touch gestures. Using it just killed the buzz. I returned it after a day. What a letdown that was.

Sure, it is cheaper than paper art.

Firstly, if you're set on digital, I recommend Huion as a good, reasonably priced brand for digital tablets. Check out the reviews on youtube. Wacom continue to charge boutique prices for their products after over a decade and I think these are unacceptable for new starters and overpriced compared to competitors. I bought an H610 on sale many years ago and I would vouch for the brand. You won't be missing out on things like sensitivity levels. I think that a good normal-sized Huion tablet is priced such that you won't feel bad if you decide not to pursue the hobby, which is important, I think.

Next you need some software. A lot of people swore by Paint Tool Sai in my day but I think this comes down to your budget and preference. Maybe watch some reviews to get a feel for what is possible.

I would recommend checking for free resources and guidance available for learning to draw on reddit or similar, next. I'm certain they have lists of handy courses and books to consider.

There was this ratio I read somewhere that described the number of people who owned a musical instrument versus the number of people who practice their instrument on a regular basis. I'd be surprised if that ratio is 2:1. It's probably more like 10:1 or more. While it's never too early to start looking at investing in tools, I think the discussion is a bit premature. The OP hasn't even told us why they want to draw scientific diagrams or even if they like drawing. Imagine investing all this money in something they don't even like but are now stuck doing. How hell-ish would that be? It could only be surpassed by being paid to have smiling depression, which is one of the deadliest forms of depression. Teeheehee.

https://www.healthline.com/health/smiling-depression

I think the important thing when beginning to aquire any skill is to just start doing things so you can understand the medium. After you've actually gained familiarity with whatever it is you've been learning, then you start reading tutorials and the like. That's when they'll actually make sense and you can internally apply the concepts they teach.

If you absolutely must have structure to your initial learning, I've heard good things about drawabox. Though they suggest starting with physical paper and pens.

As a beginner, the materials you use to draw are irrelevant, until you get to the higher levels. Honestly, I've done 90% of my drawing with just a standard commodity HB or #2 graphite pencil and various pens on scratch paper. If you're intent on going digital, I've had good experiences with an iPad Pro and Apple Pencil, their graphics input and rendering is extremely low-latency so it feels like drawing on paper. But you can start with any pressure-sensitive tablet and stylus.

Drawing is all about perceiving angles and distances more accurately, improving your eye-hand coordination, and lots of practice.

Start by practicing the basic forms:

- cubes

- triangular prisms

- spheres

- cylinders

Then start noticing that most objects consist of some combination of these shapes. Identify how you would subdivide an object you see into these shapes. Perhaps learn about the theory of 1-dimensional and 2-dimensional perspective: https://www.artistsnetwork.com/art-mediums/learn-to-draw-per...

Next learn about value (light-dark) and start cross-hatching or shading your works. A good exercise is to draw a value scale: 10 squares in a row, ranging from pitch black to completely white. Make each square as uniform in color as possible, and the transitions from black to white as uniform as possible using only fine cross-hatching: https://www.thedrawingsource.com/value-scale.html

Next draw a sphere, paying attention to lighting: https://www.thedrawingsource.com/shading-a-sphere.html

At this point, it's just a matter of practice. Carry your tablet or a sketchbook everywhere and just draw on a regular basis and ask artists for feedback (post on https://www.reddit.com/r/learntodraw/, there are people there who will help you).

A good introductory book is How to Draw What You See: http://carlosdamascenodesenhos.com.br/wp-content/uploads/201...

Wish you all the best on your drawing journey, it's a very rewarding art, but requires a lot of practice and patience to get good at it!

Not sure why'd you want to skip traditional stuff. A sketchbook, some pencils and micron pens will cost you 40$ and last a year. But anyway, for drawing there's almost no difference between digital/analogue if you use a tablet with a screen. I'd suggest an Ipad for sketching because it's small and portable. I used an old and small model and it worked really well - doesn't need to be the newest ipad pro.

Your example is a vector illustration and I've done very few of those. I started with a sketch in Photoshop or pencil or whatever and then traced it in by mouse or used some tracing filter in Illustrator and still cleaned it up with a mouse. So it wasn't really a drawing nor painting, not sure how vector pros approach it.

Buy IPad and an Apple Pen, and buy Procreate (https://procreate.art/).

After that, well, its just art.

Bonus for parents: most 5 year-olds can get comfortable with Procreate on an iPad in just one or two sessions - although abstractions like layers remain a bit beyond them.

Yeah, my kids picked it up very quickly, and in just a couple years surpassed anything I've ever been able to do. Also they quickly moved on to doing full animations (which to be fair, is a lot easier to do digitally than on paper)

Just draw more. I recommend you go to Youtube, there are a ton of talented digital artists there, you can learn everything nowadays!

You can also defer this skill set to an AI like stable-diffusion or DALLE2 these days.

Here are my recommendations:

1. Traditional has the advantage for learning the physical skills and coordination of drawing because there is zero latency; no gadget beats a good pen on smooth drawing paper for making the result be exactly what you put into it, and not a sluggish, smoothed approximation. For learning grip specifically, I also consider fountain pens to be the best option because they demand a specific contact angle and awareness of nib direction; they resist wiggling the pen willy-nilly. An inexpensive fountain like any of Pilot's entry level(even the disposable Varsity pens) is fine for this.

2. The cheapest and simplest way to jump in with digital and really draw(vs using digital just for edits or leaning on the technical tools) is to use a capacitive stylus and draw on your phone with apps like Ibispaint X, Procreate and Sketchbook. Don't get just any stylus; Meko has a good mesh tip stylus design that has a marker feel. The disc tip feels more precise but I find that it gets dirty and loses contact more often.

3. If you get a tablet, the two features that really matter are that it uses EMR technology or a variant(which is true of all the major brands except, I think, Apple, which is also good because it's Apple) and whether or not it has a screen of some kind. There are small differences in precision between brands and generations of tech, but functionally, a tablet is a fancy mouse; it tracks movement and reads pressure, the rest is software magic. The screen mostly matters because of latency; if you are coloring, painting with small strokes and making selection edits it doesn't matter as much and you can enjoy better ergonomics, but if you are making precise freehand lines, being able to see your hand becomes essential. If the screen is large that's not necessarily good because it means more hand movement to access menus.

4. For learning observational drawing I suggest looking up Charles Bargue's plates, which are very old, still in use and a well-regarded course for practicing progressively more difficult drawing subjects. The techniques of observation come down to different ways of measuring proportion: sight-size, comparative measurement, and grid drawing. Each of those three has hundreds of video tutorials. If you work through a lot of material it'll become automatic to know "how" to study a drawing and copy it.

5. Everything else builds on the measuring skills of observational drawing. If you can observe shapes and reproduce them, you can then go on to observe patches of light and shadow as shapes and begin painting those; if you can break down the anatomy of a figure into a collection of shapes describing a pose and perspective, you can apply technical understanding of perspective and 3D forms to transform them into new poses. And so on.