Guides and ideas for turning photos into doodles, remixing collaboratively, and using Grovetracks to make and share art.
Draw a cute friendly ghost for Halloween from a circle and a sheet: sketch the shapes, add the face line and wavy hem, find the outline, fill the white sheet, then add one shadow and one highlight. A beginner friendly ghost drawing tutorial you can follow in the Grovetracks editor.
Draw a black cat sitting in front of a full moon from a circle, an egg and two triangles: sketch the shapes, add face and tail lines, find the outline, colour the cat and the moon, then add a rim of moonlight and gold eyes. A beginner friendly Halloween drawing tutorial you can follow in the Grovetracks editor.
Draw a clay diya lamp for Diwali from an oval, a bowl and a teardrop: sketch the shapes, add the spout and flame line, find the outline, colour it terracotta and gold, then add a glow and one shadow and one highlight. A beginner friendly drawing tutorial you can follow in the Grovetracks editor.
Draw a cute owl on a branch from an egg and two circles: sketch the shapes, add wings and ear tufts, find the outline, colour it brown and gold, then add one shadow and one highlight. A beginner friendly autumn drawing tutorial you can follow in the Grovetracks editor.
Draw a red toadstool from a dome, a flat oval and a post: sketch the shapes, find the outline and gills, colour the cap and spots, then add one shadow and one highlight. A beginner friendly autumn drawing tutorial you can follow in the Grovetracks editor.
Draw a pumpkin from five overlapping ovals: sketch the shapes, find the lobed outline, fill it with orange, then add one shadow and one highlight. A beginner friendly autumn drawing tutorial you can follow in the Grovetracks editor.
When the light is behind your subject, the side you can see is unlit and ordinary shading has nothing to work with. Five rules from recent Understory drawings: a backlit maple leaf, a tree frog, a rooster's comb, and a row of icicles.
An otter with slightly bigger ears reads as a wet cat. Five rules for making a drawing name its own species: the landmark feature, the nearest wrong animal, proportion, pattern spacing, and pose.
White has no room left to get lighter and black has none left to get darker, so neither can be shaded the usual way. Five rules from a week of Understory drawings: a swan, a black cat, a puffin in fog, a zebra, and a bighorn ram.
Texture that reads is shaded into a surface, not drawn on top of it. Six rules from four recent Understory drawings: rake the light, break the grid, tie your marks to one cause, and let a run fade out.
Depth has almost nothing to do with vanishing points. Four recent drawings from Understory show the moves that make a flat picture feel deep: haze the distance toward the sky, blur the background, crop something dark into the front, and keep far edges soft.
The strongest storytelling tool in a drawing is the empty space between two subjects. Four recent pieces from Understory show how the gap between a diving kingfisher and a fish, a frog and a dragonfly, a cat and a bird, and a glowing tent and the Perseids turns a still image into a moment.
You cannot draw light itself, only what it touches. Three new night scenes from Understory show how glowing lanterns, lighthouse beams, and porch lights are built from ordinary strokes: fused halos, rim light, dark silhouettes, and pools of glow.
A step by step guide to remixing digital art online: find a composition you like, branch it onto your own canvas, edit it, and publish while keeping the full lineage back to the original.
For the 250th Fourth of July, Understory drew the celebration's underlying geometry as procedural art: a radial firework burst, a five-pointed star tessellation, the Liberty Bell's crack, layered eagle feather arcs, a 13-ray colonial sunburst, and two hero scenes of the grand finale.
For Bloomsday 2026, Understory drew the Dublin of Ulysses as procedural structure: the Sandycove Martello tower, the door of 7 Eccles Street, a stream of consciousness in gold line, the tide arcs of Sandymount Strand, and a dawn hero scene over Dublin Bay.
For the 2026 World Cup, Understory drew the tournament's hidden geometry as procedural art: the truncated-icosahedron ball, a sagging goal-net mesh, a gold pitch plan, concentric stadium tiers, festival bunting, and a floodlit bowl glowing at night, with not a crest or mascot in sight.
For the House of the Dragon Season 3 premiere, Understory drew Westeros as procedural structure: a dragonscale wall, a wing membrane, watered Valyrian steel, the Iron Throne as a blade cluster, the Dragonstone arch, and two hero scenes of the Battle of the Gullet and the fortress at dusk.
For National Donut Day 2026, Understory drew a five-up box of rendered hero donuts entirely from procedural geometry: glaze, sprinkles, drips, and powdered sugar, each a living composition you can recolor, branch, and remix.
For Towel Day 2026, Grovetracks rendered three pieces of Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy visual mythology: the coast of Earth Mk II under construction by Slartibartfast, the Vogon constructor fleet over Earth, and an array of award-winning fjords.
A step-by-step guide to making a digital art collage online, free: browse ready-made pieces, then arrange, resize, rotate, and recolor them into something new on a shared canvas.
For World Turtle Day 2026, Grovetracks rendered one sea turtle two ways: four procedural compositions built from shell geometry, and one traced from a photograph into editable strokes.
A practical framework for choosing an online drawing tool in 2026: the criteria that actually matter, and how the major free and paid tools compare.
A step-by-step guide to converting any photo into a hand-drawn doodle online, free, no signup required, with editable strokes you can recolor and remix.