…pencil sketches to start. I am a rank beginner, who might possibly have a modicum (and I mean a wee modicum) of talent.
I’d try the usual stuff- people, still lifes, scapes, and so on.
What books, videos, etc., would you recommend for starters?
I don’t know I could recommend a single book for all beginning artists. I’m not a professional artist; I just draw for fun and I don’t know a particular teaching method. What I can suggest is that you learn a few techniques and tricks which usually get beginners out of the gate, so to speak.
First, learn to scribble. You must learn that it’s perfectly all right that your first sketch, your first line on the page, won’t be perfect. Just draw another one, and another one a bit darker, until you get that curve or angle the way you want it. Set aside your eraser and don’t worry that your sketch doesn’t look magically perfect; it never will. Scribbling — drawing multiple lines lightly until you get the shape just right — gets you past the fear of making something imperfect. It also lends your drawing fuzzy edges and soft focus which hides your imperfections — and at first, you will have imperfections.
Second, draw from an upside-down photograph or picture. Copy what you see from that upside-down shape and it will train your eye. Beginning artists often make the mistake of trying to draw something that they “know” should be a certain shape, instead of drawing what’s actually in front of them.
Third, don’t worry about copying anybody’s particular style. I see a lot of beginning artists trying to draw Anime or Manga figures these days. Don’t worry about that — being able to draw what you see is so much more important than drawing what somebody else sees. Once you can do that, you can copy anybody’s style… though by then you’ll have invented your own and you may not want to. 
Fourth, try lots of media. Pens, ink, pencils, charcoal. Move on from there to colored pencils and pens, pastels, watercolors, or whatever suits you. You may find you have no talent at line art, but you’re hell on wheels with color and light.
Last, try sketching without using outlines. Instead, draw blobs of light and dark and don’t worry so much if the general outline isn’t perfect. This will show you there are other ways to draw than simply copying what you saw in coloring books as a child.
Oh — and draw a lot. A lot. Even if it sucks at first. I believe it was Picasso who said “everybody has a thousand bad drawings in him. The sooner you get them out of the way, the better.”
A couple of my art teachers had us students buy a large pad of manila paper. Each of them had us fill a page of that pad a day…it didn’t have to be one sketch per page, we could do several smaller sketches on one page. But we had to use at least one page a day. They didn’t have to be finished pictures. If we wanted to do just exercises in perspective or shading or concentrate on doing hands, that was fine. The reason these teachers had us do this was to get us in the habit of drawing every day, and practice does make perfect, or at least the student will get better. Look at how da Vinci made sketches of hands, or characters, or of the human body. He was a fantastic artist, and yet he kept on practicing. Go to the library and examine some biographies of famous artists, especially those books that have samples of the artists’ sketches.
Right now, I’m doing leaves. I bring in a couple of leaves every few days, and I sketch those leaves. Not because I particularly like leaves (though I do like them) but because they’re free, easily obtainable, and hold still.
I don’t have any advice, but thanks for starting this thread, BarnOwl. I could’ve written your post!
Copy other drawings and photos. Copy, copy, copy. Copy them over and over again.
Buy tracing paper and just trace over other stuff for a while. Do it again and again. This will help your physical technique. If drawing human figures, keep the proper body proportions in mind. The biggest mistake beginning artists make (and advanced artists keep repeating) is unrealistic, weird anatomical proportions.
Rob Liefeld, illustrator of Image’s Youngblood series and eventually Captain America, succeeded in the comics industry all through the 90’s, and his body proportions are absolute shit. Images like this one are brutally mocked by comics fans for the ridiculous overblown muscles and the faces that all look exactly the same. His side profile of Captain America , for instance, is so fuckin’ ridiculous that someone created an unclothed version (safe for work) which you can see on the right of that image illustrating what his muscles would actually look like. Horrible, horrible, horrible. And yet he has been profiting from this artwork. It’s amazing how many artists, beginner and advanced, fuck up the body proportions.
Drawing has two parts: the physical technique (the way you use your pencil or pen, the way you hold it, the angle you apply it, how hard you push it, etc) and the mental technique which is much harder and more complicated - i.e. being able to either make up your own images and translate them onto the paper.
You don’t need a book or a video. You can do this yourself, if you just work at it. If you do the physical part of drawing enough, the mental part will develop on its own. Trace, copy, sketch, scribble, over and over.
I agree that tracing is a valuable technical practice, that trains your hand to draw what your eye sees, and to draw steady lines, and so on.
It applies best to high-contrast line images, like comic-book characters. Natural photographs don’t have much in the way of clear, crisp lines that are easy to trace; you may find that tracing doesn’t work as well on every kind of drawing, and copying by eye is more effective.
The point of the exercise isn’t to create art, but to train your hand to make the art your eye wants to see — sort of the way playing scales isn’t “music,” but it educates the muscles in your fingers to do what your ear wants.
Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain by Betty Edwards is IMO the best book for learning how to see stuff and translate what you see into what you draw. It makes the process very accessible, and covers lots of mistakes that entrap and discourage drawing students.
I think I heard that they did a recent updated version, but that the new content is kinda bleh and the original old version is still better (and found cheaply, used).
Argent Towers, that comparison drawing is hilarious! I should expect (and hope) that Liefeld stylizes figures to that extreme on purpose, though. I mean, it’s not like Manga is realistic figure drawing either.
What toadbriar said. There is a newer version, and also a workbook. The workbook is pretty decent.
A third for Drawing on the Right Hand Side of the Brain. What others have said about learning to draw what something looks like instead of what you think it looks like is what that book is all about.
And then later on, you can draw things the way you see them instead of what they look like. Knowing the rules before you can break them, and all that.