I’ve never heard of drawing on the right side of the brain, but now I really want to check it out! My suggestion would be to take a class for it. The cheapest classes you will probably find will be at a community college or community center, and if you’re just starting out the important thing is to have some kind of instruction. Art colleges and maybe some artist studios teach more expensive classes that might help you refine your technique. The best way to get better is to draw from life, a lot. You should do it on your own free time, too. You don’t have to get an easel and set up outside (but that is a lot of fun), just start by doing quick pencil drawings of small objects or maybe people and things you see in public. It’s good to have a sketchbook so you can see your progress. As I learned life drawing, I started to realize that a big part of technical skill is just knowing what you’re looking at. For example, once in a class we had a still-life (a bunch of objects, basically) with a lamp shining on a black paper background. Most people showed the light on the background by mixing white and black paint, but the light was actually really warm, not just white. It turned out better to mix a little black, a little yellow, some red, and some warm brown.
Studying human anatomy is helpful, but taking a life drawing class will really teach you to draw people. One of the first things they might have you do is draw a skeleton, which is a great exercise. A lot of life drawing classes include human anatomy lessons, like bone structure and muscle groups.
There’s no real sequence for using painting supplies, but acrylic and pastels seem to be the easiest to work with. Acrylic is great because you can thin it down like watercolors or build it up like oil, and you can use it with either of these types of paints in the same painting. There are probably better kinds of acrylic, but I’m really used to Liquitex. A good set of paints that will let you mix all kinds of colors is- titanium white, cadmium red, cadmium yellow, yellow- ochre? It’s kind of a mustardy yellow-, a dark red (don’t remember the name either, sorry), cobalt blue, ultramarine blue, burnt sienna, burnt umber, and hooker’s green.
This is the basic set that a lot of my painting classes have required. It’s good because every time you get two versions of a color, or a brown (burnt siennna and burnt umber are really nice warm browns), it is a color that it would be really hard for you to mix yourself. You might notice that I said don’t get black. You can mix a black out of burnt umber and ultramarine blue that looks a lot livelier on the page than just black paint would. Unless it’s pitch dark, stuff that we perceive as black is usually just deep shadow. You can often paint shadows by mixing in blue or purple to the color you are already using. It will look great.
Acrylic works great with stiff bristly brushes- the kind that have beige or cream colored bristles and feel natural.
Oil pastels are really fun to draw on newsprint, because it is so smooth, or on colored, textured paper, because the color will show through. You can also use chalk pastels the same way. They are powdery, so if you build up too much color it will just get muddy, but they are a lot of fun. Both of these are great for quick sketches.
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