“Can you give tips for how to draw realistically?”
The best way to improve your drawing realistically is to keep comparing the drawing you make with the subject that you’re drawing. Whether you’re drawing a model, a landscape, or a still life, or what have you. The best way to do this is to look at the proportions and the shading. To look at the proportions, whenever you think about that image of the artist standing at their easel, lifting up the brush, and squinting one eye, they’re actually taking measurements.
So say you’re drawing the face, you can look at the model, hold up your pencil or brush, and measure out, “alright, look, it looks like the nose and the ear are about the same length,” and you can remember that ratio when you’re continuing your drawing. That’s one way to keep in mind the realistic nature of the drawing that you’re trying to create.
The second one, with the shading, is to identify really quickly what you’re looking at, the lightest light and darkest dark, and fill in the in betweens. Using these two methods, both measurements, and accurate shading, then you can see how your drawing will drastically start to improve and become more like the subject you’re drawing.
However, it’s important to know with realistic drawing, it is not always the sure fire way to make a good drawing. There are many other factors that come into play like composition, your own personal voice, things like that. Great artists from throughout history, everyone from Leonardo da Vinci to Dr. Seuss, have always taken life, drawn from it, been inspired by it, and then put their own little twist and their own personal vision on it. So learning to draw realistically is a terrific skill, but it isn’t the only thing you need to work on.