The beginning

To get started, all you need is a simple drawing pad like the ones students use and a couple of pencils in different degrees of hardness like 2H, 2B and 4B. The former is good for a first, light preliminary drawing, the latter for the further elaboration of the drawing.

A drawing textbook can be useful, although not essential. At least you get shown how to approach a realistic drawing. However, don't expect your own drawings to look as good as the ones in the book.

There are many tutorials on the Internet, and many of them are free. Youtube is full of it. Some of it is better, some worse.

If you want to get started on your own first, you should take a look around in your own apartment. It is certainly full of objects that are very geometric in shape - cups, glasses, pots, bowls, jars and tubes, bottles, boxes and the like. In the beginning, the main thing is to capture and implement the contours correctly. While practicing this, you can look around for the ideal drawing book or online tutorial.

If you deal with different instructions for drawing, you will find that a lot of advice is always the same, but that it sometimes contradicts itself from tutorial to tutorial. That's because when it comes to the practice of drawing, there are no hard and fast rules, just recommendations and different ways of doing something that have different consequences. You should find out what suits you and stick to that.

One technique I strongly discourage, however, is what's known as the grid method, in which the same grid is applied to the photo you're drawing from and the drawing paper. You then draw box by box. That's not how you learn to draw freely, and that's not how you learn to understand a motif. A real motif is not made up of uniform boxes.

Ultimately, you can work through as many drawing books and tutorials as you like, but you learn the most through experience - learning-by-doing.