What to Draw: 100 Ideas for When You Are Stuck

12-minute read · Updated August 12, 2026

You are not short of subjects. There is a mug within two metres of you, and a mug is one of the hardest things a beginner can attempt. What you are short of is a decision.

Which is why a list on its own will not fix it. There is a fair chance you will scroll this one to the bottom, feel briefly encouraged, and draw nothing. Two things are usually going on when the choosing stalls.

The first is decision cost. Every candidate subject gets silently auditioned: is this worth the time, can I pull it off, will it look like anything when I stop. Do that thirty times and the tiredness that follows feels like a lack of inspiration. It is the same fatigue you get from an eleven-page menu.

The second is quieter and does more damage. You have subjects you care about: the harbour at dusk, your grandmother's hands, the dog asleep on the stairs. You do not draw them, because you know your current ability will not do them justice, and you would rather keep the idea intact than spend it on a drawing that fails. So you save it, and you keep saving it. The subject you are holding back until you are better is a large part of why you are not getting better.

A drawing session is not an occasion. Most of what you put on paper this year exists to build motor skill and visual habits, and nobody will ever see it. Once the drawing no longer has to be worth doing, the nearest object is as good as any other.

How to use the list

You are not meant to read all hundred. Scroll until something snags, stop there, and go and find the actual object. Everything below is a physical thing you can put on a table under a lamp, which matters, because a photograph has already done the hard part for you. It has flattened three dimensions into two, and that flattening is the skill you are trying to build. The categories start within arm's reach and end with a short walk. If you want a session structure to hang all this on, the beginner's guide to drawing daily covers how long to spend and in what order.

1. Things on your desk right now

Desk objects cost nothing to set up and are full of ellipses, overlaps and man-made straight edges, which is most of what early observation practice needs. The mug is the classic for a reason. You carry a symbol of one in your head, and the real one refuses to match it.

1. A pair of scissors lying half open, blades crossed
2. A roll of tape with the loose end lifted and stuck back on itself
3. Your stapler with the top flipped up
4. Three books stacked, spines towards you, the top one slid off-centre
5. A pencil sharpened down to a stub, shavings left where they fell
6. A receipt that was crumpled and then flattened out by hand
7. Headphone cable dropped in a loose coil, not a tidy one
8. A mug of pens seen slightly from above, so the rim is a wide ellipse
9. A bulldog clip gripping a thick fold of paper
10. Your keyboard from a low angle, so the keys run away from you

If you want the mug done properly, with the ellipse problem taken apart step by step, there is a lesson for exactly that: how to draw a coffee mug.

2. The kitchen

The kitchen holds the best free still-life material in the house. Fruit and vegetables carry a simple form underneath all their surface detail, and they forgive a millimetre of error in a way a straight-edged box never will, so you can work on shading without also fighting rigid geometry.

11. A garlic bulb with one clove pulled away and lying beside it
12. Half a lemon, cut face turned towards you
13. A colander upside down with light coming through the holes
14. A wooden spoon, the bowl stained darker than the handle
15. One egg in a shallow white dish, lit by a single lamp
16. A tea towel thrown over the tap and left hanging
17. The kettle, with the whole room bent across its side
18. Two mugs, one partly behind the other
19. A pepper grinder, tall and turned slightly on its axis
20. An onion cut in half, one outer layer lifting free

3. Things with real texture

Texture is where a lot of hobbyists stall, because the instinct is to draw every hair and every fibre, and that gives you something busy and flat. The skill is deciding where texture is visible and where it dissolves. Dense marks around the turn from light into shadow, very little in the darkest part, very little in the flat light either. Objects like these expose the draw-everything approach inside ten minutes, which is what makes them good teachers. The texture lessons work through the method one surface at a time.

21. A pinecone, scales tight at the base and open at the tip
22. A crust of bread torn open so the structure inside shows
23. The ribbed cuff of a wool jumper, stretched slightly out of shape
24. A rusted hinge or bolt, pitted rather than smooth
25. Weathered brickwork at a corner, where two faces meet
26. A dry bath sponge with frayed edges
27. The inside of a cast-iron pan, matte and faintly grainy
28. A tennis ball at the seam, where the fuzz catches the light
29. Corrugated cardboard torn to expose the flutes
30. The bristles of a scrubbing brush, splayed from use

4. Transparent and reflective things

Glass and metal look impossible and are among the most learnable subjects on this page, because they force you to stop drawing objects and start drawing shapes of tone. You cannot draw a glass. You can draw the pale and dark patches that appear where a glass is, in the right places and at roughly the right strength, and the glass turns up on its own. Squint until the detail drops out and copy whatever survives.

31. An empty tumbler with one half in shadow
32. A water bottle half full, label peeled off
33. A metal spoon face down, then the same spoon face up, side by side
34. Reading glasses folded, drawn with the shadow they throw on the table
35. A glass jar with a few coins in the bottom
36. A wine glass built from the base up, stem before bowl
37. A glass marble sitting on white paper
38. A chrome tap with the sink distorted across it
39. A clear plastic bag with something inside it
40. A switched-off phone screen, working as a black mirror

5. Whatever is in your bag

These have been in your hands so often that they have gone invisible, so drawing one is mostly an exercise in looking at something you stopped seeing years ago. They also fit on a tray table, which suits a ten-minute drawing on a train or in a waiting room.

41. Keys on a ring, splayed so no two overlap the same way
42. Sunglasses folded with one arm still open
43. Your wallet, worn pale at the corners
44. A lip balm with the cap standing beside it
45. A charging cable half wound, plug end towards you
46. A packet of tissues, part crushed
47. A used ticket, bent where it sat in a pocket
48. Loose coins in a small overlapping pile
49. A hair tie twisted into a figure of eight
50. An umbrella folded down with the strap fastened

Two of those have full lessons if you would rather be walked through the construction: a key and a pair of sunglasses.

6. Out of the window

The window is your cheapest access to perspective practice, and the subject holds still while you stay indoors. Start with one object rather than a whole street. A drainpipe makes a better first perspective drawing than a skyline, because you can check whether you got it right.

51. The roofline opposite, with its chimneys and aerials
52. A parked car at three-quarter view, both wheels as ellipses
53. A street lamp, including the bracket that holds the head
54. One tree, drawing the gaps between the branches rather than the branches
55. A drainpipe running down a wall, with its brackets
56. Wheelie bins in a row, receding
57. A bicycle leaning against railings
58. Fence posts getting closer together as they go away from you
59. Cloud, but only the shadowed underside of it
60. A window opposite with the curtains drawn halfway

7. Food

Food is the traditional answer to this question and it has earned the place: cheap, patient, and irregular enough that a small error still reads as a plum. Cut things beat whole things. A cut face gives you a second plane, and a second plane gives you something to shade against.

61. A banana just going speckled
62. A pear resting on its side rather than standing up
63. A wedge of hard cheese with two clean cut faces
64. A croissant seen from the end, so the layers spiral
65. Cherries with their stems tangled together
66. A hard-boiled egg cut lengthways, yolk showing
67. Four biscuits stacked, the top one snapped in half
68. A head of broccoli, treated as one big form before any florets
69. A takeaway cup with the lid on and the sleeve slipped down
70. A pineapple, which is a lesson in repeating a shape across a curved surface

8. Worn and used things

A new object is clean and symmetrical, and your brain will happily hand you the symbol for it. A worn one cannot be faked. The heel of an old shoe is ground down on the outer edge, a paperback breaks along one particular fold and stays open there, an eraser goes round at the corners and grey on one face. You have no stored symbol for any of that, so you are forced to look.

71. Your oldest shoe from the side, heel worn unevenly
72. A paperback with a broken spine and the cover curling
73. A chopping board covered in knife scars
74. A doormat with the bristles flattened down the middle
75. A leather belt coiled loosely, buckle on top
76. A used eraser, corners rounded, one face dirty
77. Gardening gloves, stiff and dark at the fingertips
78. A toothpaste tube rolled up from the bottom
79. The arm of a wooden chair, polished where hands have rested
80. A bar of soap worn down to a thin curved sliver

Related lessons if you want steps: a leather wallet, a tennis shoe and a rubber eraser.

9. Mechanical things

Machines are where construction stops being an abstract idea. You cannot draw a pair of pliers by tracing the outline, because the outline is a consequence of two shapes pivoting through each other. Block in the boxes and cylinders underneath first, lightly, then find the real edges on top of them. It feels slower and it is faster.

81. A bicycle crank and chainring, chain included
82. A padlock with the shackle swung open
83. Pliers with the jaws slightly parted
84. A door hinge close up, screws and all
85. A wristwatch with the strap unbuckled and lying flat
86. An old camera, lens barrel pointing slightly towards you
87. A tape measure with the blade pulled out and curling
88. A desk fan, blades seen through the guard
89. A winged corkscrew with both arms raised
90. A light switch, including the dust in the bevel

10. Natural objects, brought indoors

Ten minutes outside gets you a handful of subjects that will sit under a lamp for as long as you want. Natural forms are the cure for stiff, ruled-looking line work, since nothing here has a straight edge to hide behind. If your drawings have started to look like technical illustrations, spend a week in this section.

91. A feather, drawn as one shape before any barbs
92. A spiral shell, following the turn as it goes back in space
93. A pebble with a vein of quartz running through it
94. A dried leaf curled in on itself
95. An acorn sitting in its cup
96. A forked twig, deciding which branch is nearer
97. A conker still half inside its split case
98. A dried hydrangea head, kept as one mass with a few edges found in it
99. An empty snail shell
100. A piece of bark, ridged deep along one edge and worn flat on the other

Several of these have lessons: feather, seashell, pinecone and acorn.

When everything on the list looks boring

Boredom with a subject is usually a fact about how you are looking at it rather than a fact about the object. A paperclip is dull if the plan is to draw a paperclip. It stops being dull the moment you decide to fill an A4 page with it, because now you have to invent a tonal structure for something the size of a thumbnail. Change the terms rather than the object.

• Kill the overhead light. One lamp on the table, moved around until the cast shadow is a shape you would want to draw on its own. Most household objects are dull under flat ceiling light and dramatic under a single low source.
• Get above it, or under it. Put the object on the floor and stand over it. Or set it at eye level and lose the top surface entirely. An unfamiliar angle disables the stored symbol.
• Change the scale. Fill a whole page with something the size of a coin, or draw a chair the size of a stamp.
• Take something away. Shadow shapes only, no outlines. Twelve straight lines and no more. One continuous line without lifting the pencil. Wrong hand.
• Change the clock. The same lemon is a different exercise at two minutes and at thirty. Short forces you to find the big shapes. Long forces you to keep looking after you think you have finished.

Worth noticing which of those you skip past. People tend to avoid the same one every time, and that is usually the one doing the most work.

Draw the same object ten times

Variety is overrated as a learning strategy. A new subject every day keeps you permanently at the start of the problem, working out where things go, never reaching the part where you make decisions.

Take the mug again. The first drawing is logistics: how wide is the rim next to the base, where does the handle attach, why does it look wrong. The third is roughly accurate. Around the fifth you stop measuring anxiously and start noticing things you had not seen at all, such as the shadow inside the mug being lighter than the shadow it casts on the table, because light is bouncing up off the table and back into the cup. By the eighth you have attention to spare, and spare attention is where the choices about edge and weight get made.

Repetition also gives you the only honest measure of progress you have. Comparing this week's pinecone with last month's pear tells you nothing, since the two were not equally hard. The same object drawn eight weeks apart is a real before and after. Pick one thing, draw it once a week, keep the attempts in the same sketchbook, and do not look back at the early ones until you have five or six.

If choosing is the problem, remove the choice

All of the above assumes you will do the choosing. If you have read this far and already know you will not pick anything tonight, the fix is structural rather than motivational. Have the subject decided before you sit down.

That is what Draw Daily does. One exercise each morning, a specific subject with steps and a reference sketch, sent by email so the decision is already made by the time you open your inbox. You can read today's lesson without signing up for anything, and the archive holds every past one if you would rather browse. It is free, and there are around fifty-six lessons in it so far.

If you want more scaffolding first, the beginner lessons are grouped on their own, and how to learn to draw as an adult covers the first year in more detail. Otherwise, scroll back to number one and go and find the scissors.