“Can you give tips for how to draw realistically?”
Basically there are two things to do if you want to learn how to draw realistically. The first thing is, you want to draw every day. Practice and repetition are really important, there’s no way you can draw a lot and not get better. In that way, drawing is a lot like athletics, you really do have to be “in shape.” You have to sharpen your eye, you have to exercise drawing muscles.
Second thing is, you need to draw from life. Don’t draw from photographs. Drawing is as much about learning how to see, as it actually is about making the marks on the paper. Drawing from life will get you to look a lot more closely, and you’re going to see so much more detail in person, it’s going to be so much more fun. A photo is really limited, it’s flat, and you don’t get to interact with your subject.
Just think about it this way: think about how different it is to see a photo of a person, and to meet them in real life. There’s just no comparison. A photo just tells you what that person looks like, nothing else. When you meet somebody in real life, you know what kind of person they are, you know what their character is. So if you drawing somebody in life, you can really bring that personality into the drawing.
Get a small sketchbook and a pencil, something that’s really easy to carry around. Drawing can be super casual, it doesn’t have to be a big huge effort, it’s something you can do just a few minutes at a time, just a little bit every day. You can draw five minute sketches of your friends, when they’re hanging out. You can draw your family when they’re watching TV. I had a friend in art school, he used to go to parties on campus with his sketchbook, and he would draw people at the parties. I had another friend who liked drawing at the beach, because everyone is just lying around sun bathing, not moving at all, so perfect conditions for drawing.
All that time you spend drawing really adds up. You won’t see results within two days, but if you keep at it for several weeks, you’re going to see visible results. There’s no way you can put in that amount of time and not make progress.