General Drawing Advice

Choosing Paper
I suggest using a good rag (100% cotton) or a wood based paper that has been buffered. Any other type of paper will yellow in a very short time. I've written reviews of some the paper I've tried that might help you make a choice.

Drawing from Photo References
There are two things about photography that I'd like to share with you. If you want to capture natural lighting, turn off your flash. If the light is very dim, use a tripod to reduce blur. I never use a flash because it's always the beautiful natural lighting that attracts me to a scene. The other thing that I suggest is taking lots of photos of your subject using different focus points if possible. I do this as often as I can so I won't be stuck with only the focus the camera lens has given me.

Learning How to Draw - Some Basic Advice and Exercises

Understanding Perspective
Perspective gives so many people trouble because of psychology, I think. We tend to make the things that are interesting or important to us larger when we're drawing them. What really helped me learn to see perspective, and to understand how to draw what I was seeing, was to draw on a window. I would look through a window and trace what I saw with a wax pencil. Something about running a pencil tip over the lines of objects helped me to understand perspective in an intuitive way. This exercise may help you too.

Using a Graphite Wash to do Value Studies
This is a good technique to help you learn to see things in terms of values. Put down a layer of ground graphite with a brush all over your paper. (You can buy ground graphite at the hardware store or you can grind your own.) Once you have your paper covered to about a medium value, use a kneaded eraser to "draw" your subject lightly into the graphite mist. Pick out all the highlights with a kneaded eraser and darken in the shadows with a soft lead. You can create some lovely three dimensional modeling this way.

Learning to control your tools
Half the battle of learning to draw is being able to make your pencil draw what your eye sees. I have written three lessons intended to teach tool control:

Draw a Smoothie
Draw a Graduation
How to Make and Use Powdered Graphite

Last Thoughts

Ice, Fur and Other Details
Don't let any subject frighten you. All subjects can be broken down into values if you just take the time to really look at them. Ice, skin, fur, hard and soft textures ... they all can be drawn if you think of them as values.

Try not to get bogged down by including to many details. You'll develop an instinct for knowing how much is too much eventually. If you feel overwhelmed, that's a sign you're adding too much. You'll find that getting the big underlying values right is more important than getting all the details right most of the time.

As you're editing colors into values of gray, you'll have to make many little adjustments as you draw. Red and green can be the same value, for instance, so to draw a red rose surrounded by green you usually have to make the red rose lighter or the green background darker. Let your eyes tell you what you need to do and listen to your intuition.

Advice for the Beginner
When you first start learning how to draw, take it slowly. Twenty to thirty minute sessions are about right at first. Work slowly up to sessions that are an hour or two long.

Don't judge your efforts too harshly and don't give up because you think you're not as good as others. You'll never know what unique things you have to say if you don't give yourself enough time to learn how to say them.

Our talent is always in development and, as it matures, some earlier works will not look as good to you as they did when you first made them. If that happens, congratulate yourself on having grown.

Keep working ... always keep working ... especially through your doubting periods.

Drawing as a Lifestyle
Drawing is an extremely expressive way of communicating how you feel about life, and learning to draw is like learning a new language with a vocabulary that can be understood by everyone all over the world. Drawing is a universal language. When you learn to draw you are joining hands with artists across cultures and across time. Drawing is more than making marks on paper; part of yourself is shared with the world when you draw. Being able to draw effects every part of your life and in this way it truly becomes a lifestyle.