About This Project

Howtodraw.art is an interactive infographic designed to visualize and explore the most popular drawing-related search queries on the internet.

Why do we need it? Drawing is a universal form of expression and communication, yet it often poses challenges for beginners and experts alike. By visualizing popular drawing topics and trends, Howtodraw.art provides valuable insights into what people around the globe want to learn, helping educators, artists, and hobbyists identify and respond to emerging interests and educational needs.

We hope that this website will be useful to amateur and advanced artists, educators, and researchers, providing valuable resources and insights tailored to their varying needs.

Interface Overview

You can explore drawing trends interactively through intuitive visualizations and step-by-step tutorials.

The homepage provides three interactive views: a Grid View showcasing illustrated keywords visually, a List View presenting keywords in a table format for easy comparison, and a TreeMap View where keyword sizes reflect search volumes, grouped by categories. A toggle button allows seamless switching between these views, with additional "show more" functionality in TreeMap View to reveal detailed subcategories.

Clicking any keyword navigates to its dedicated page, offering an in-depth exploration of keyword-specific insights. Each keyword page includes detailed graphs highlighting search volume trends over time, comparative analysis with top category keywords, a geographic map displaying countries most interested in the keyword, and a practical step-by-step drawing guide along with common mistakes to avoid.

How Did We Get the Data?

Data for Howtodraw.art comes directly from Ahrefs API, ensuring accuracy and reliability.

Ahrefs is an industry-leading SEO toolkit equipped with one of the internet's largest and most powerful web crawlers, capable of analyzing search volume and trends extensively. Utilizing Ahrefs Keywords Explorer, we identified "how to draw" as a particularly engaging topic due to its visual nature and universal appeal—everyone has drawn something at least once.

We selected the top 1000 most popular "how to draw ..." search query keywords topic to form our dataset. We meticulously cleaned this data, removing irrelevant or spam queries such as "how to draw good" or "home to draw something," retaining only meaningful nouns referring to concrete drawing subjects. Similar queries were consolidated—for example, "how to draw a dog easy", "how to draw a dog" and "how to draw a dog step by step" were grouped as one entry.

We then retrieved historical search volume data from Ahrefs and manually validated it against Google Trends historical data. This allowed us to observe distinct trends, seasonal patterns, and comparative popularity among keywords. Finally, each keyword was visually illustrated and organized with OpenAI API into a structured, two-level categorization system to enhance navigability and user experience.

For more technical details, refer to the Ahrefs API documentation.

Credits

Designed and developed by Mark Vital. Journalism and art curation by Anna Vital.