Full disclosure: the illustrator who wrote the open letter is my 15 year old sister — she is currently pretty stoked right now.

An iPad Pro with a Pencil seems like it would provide an endless sketchbook for someone who can already draw or paint.

My question is what's a good way for someone with zero ability to develop these abilities? Getting ProCreate, the iPad Pro, and the Pencil is the easy part. Developing a little bit of drawing skill is a big hurdle.

Disclaimer: Not an artist myself, however i have learned much of the basics and am friends with many artists (e.g. http://kaceym.deviantart.com/ ) who earn their daily bread with commissions and have heard plenty about how they progressed.

The best way to develop them is, as with any physical skill: Basics, basics, basics. One doesn't become a master carpenter without hammering in thousands of nails.

This means, before telling you what to do, i need to warn you to not get too emotionally involved with any given piece. A day where you did 20 sketches in 5 hours will bring you forward. A day where you spent 10 hours on one piece holds you back. (At least at the start.) Don't bother with colors. Learn geometry, projection, proportions, lighting first. Colors only help to hide mistakes. Once you know all these things in and out, that's when it's time to start breaking rules.

Lastly, look up the books on drawing technique by Burne Hogarth and Andrew Loomis.

If you want to learn to draw from life, the biggest hurdle is learning to interpret visual signals directly -- what artists refer to as "learning to see". Your brain naturally wants to turn visual input (edge, color, pattern) into higher-level concepts ("house", "nose", "cat", etc.), which is wonderful for general survival but unhelpful when this interpretive step inserts itself in the path from your eyes to your pencil.

However, there are a variety of exercises you can do to learn to see low-level visual input over higher-level interpretations, like copying images upside-down, following a visual edge with both eye and pencil, using a viewfinder or grid to narrow attention, measuring angles/distances between landmarks, moving attention to "negative space", etc.

You can find these kinds of exercises in most life drawing books. I particularly like "Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain", as it's structured for independent study, it has a focus on quickly producing results for absolute novices, and it has a scientific bent -- although anything it says about physical neurological structure should be taken with a grain of salt.

I agree with all of this. I draw/paint a lot more since I got my iPad Pro, and it's helped my skills.

Still, I can't draw nearly this well, and I'm over twice her age. Clearly the tools are nice, but raw talent is still 90% of the equation.

Congratulations, these illustrations are beautiful!

thank you!

The author makes it seem like drawing on an iPad pro is so much fun that I want to try it. This kid has finally offered me a compelling reason to try an iPad pro. Apple should hire this girl.

Thanks so much!!!! Try it out at your local Apple Store and you won't be disappointed.. although they don't have Procreate on the demo versions.

You just broke my sarcasm detector.

Since I first heard of the pen and saw the technical details of it (e.g. latency, tilt feature, palm detection) and general faith in Apple's ability to leapfrog innovate, I knew it'd be a huge deal.

I'm not an artist but when I tried it for the first time at the Apple store, I was blown away much more than I expected and had I been an artist, I would have probably had the same reaction as the author.

TL;DR: Fangirl writes gushing praise to CEO about company's new product, CEO sends back response written by marketing department.

That's assuming the whole thing isn't astroturfing.

P.S: You're not a "simple 15 year old" if you can afford an iPad Pro.

Actually, I'd been saving my pennies for a year for something else, and decided to switch directions when the Pro came out. Do I still count as simple now?? ;P

You assume a lot. My sister (who just replied to you) babysat for over a year to save up for a windows product and decided to get the iPad when it came out. I saw the whole process and she genuinely loves it — not because she is a fan girl but because it has made a huge impact on her career. I think it's a super inspiring story for artists young and old and a genuine compliment to the iPad Pro.

Oh come on, please don't post bilious Grinchy stuff here. Even if you're right, it just makes this place nastier—and there was a nontrivial chance you were wrong, in which case your comment would be mean (as it turned out to be). So the expected value was negative from the beginning.

Even on cynical terms, your analysis was lazy: it would be a lot more work for Tim Cook to get the marketing department to do anything than just send that reply.

Wow this is an unnecessarily bitter comment!

Totally agree. What's noteworthy here? That a corporate demigod answers briefly and mechanically to an email? That a fangirl can't hide its hype? That a talented girl is using this expensive piece of hardware to make its creations? I'm confused.

Sometimes people just like things.