Drawing is primal. I bet you’ve been drawing since before you could talk. It is common to all and deeply personal at once. Whether you choose to draw a tree or just a looping spiral, by putting marks on paper, you connect the inner workings of your mind to the world outside it. So, are you ready to take a serious step toward sharpening your drawing skills? Well, you’ve come to the right place! This chapter is an introduction to drawing as a subject of study. Along with a quick summary of the materials and skills you need to get started, you find useful information about historical and contempo rary approaches to drawing. In case you want to know more about any of the top ics I touch briefly on here, I’ve peppered this chapter with references to other chapters where you can find in-depth coverage. As a bonus, I’ve included some information right at the beginning about how to tell whether drawing is for you. (Spoiler alert: Drawing is for you!.
Testing the Waters: Do You Have What It Takes to Draw?
For many burgeoning artists who have a nagging, tickling idea that they may have what it takes to draw, testing out the dream feels like a real risk. After all, if they fail, the dream will be gone — just like that. If you’re afraid to risk losing your dream of becoming an artist, I hear you and am here to say you can stop worrying. Go ahead and take the risk; you may be surprised to discover that it isn’t really a risk after all for one simple reason: Anyone who wants to learn to draw can do it.
Debunking the talent myth
Every elementary school has at least one kid who can draw an amazing unicorn (or some other detailed animal or object) without looking at any books or photos for inspiration. All the teachers and students look at that kid and say, “That kid’s got real talent.” Maybe you were that kid in your school. Or maybe you only wished you could draw like that kid. Either way, you can learn to draw well today as long as you’re ready to put your mind (and pencil) to work.
What’s called talent in drawing is actually a heightened sensitivity to visual facts. (Lucky for you, this is something anyone can develop!) To draw well, you must be able to see the physical facts of things, such as size, shape, value, texture, and color and to make comparisons. Familiar objects are often hard to draw because, when you look things you know well, your brain doesn’t take time to carefully analyze the way they look. To see things as they actually are, you need to practice looking deeply. When you’re really tuned in to the facts of what something looks like, that particular something becomes much easier to draw. (See Chapters 2 and 6 for some great tips on how to increase your visual sensitivity.)
Talent on its own doesn’t make an artist. Yes, the ability to see like an artist and make visual comparisons is a necessary condition for drawing well, but they don’t matter at all if you don’t also have a passion for drawing. Even if you feel like you have no artistic talent whatsoever, if you have a desire to draw in your bones, you can master the other stuff with determination and practice. After all, the bulk of getting better at drawing is practice — not talent. No matter how talented you are, you won’t grow as an artist if you don’t practice. Passion is what gives you the motivation and courage to do that work
Embracing your individuality
A great way to learn how to draw is to lean into learning about your idols and try ing to make work like theirs. Copying is a great way to practice and develop your drawing skills. Just know that you can’t claim any copied work as your own. (Check out Chapters 3, 5, and 15 for details on how to develop as an artist by using other artists’ works as inspiration, and refer to Chapter 16 for more details on copyright.
Eventually, you will want to let go of your influences so you can develop who you are as an artist, but you’ll probably always see some of your idols’ influence in your work. Even the most well-known and accomplished artists are influenced by the work of others. For example, you can see traces of Cezanne in Picasso, but Picasso was still unarguably unique.
Even as you copy the works and styles of your idols, don’t forget to embrace your individuality as an artist. Don’t try to purge the things about your drawings that make you unique. Your idols had time to discover who they are as artists; now it’s your turn! The things that make you different are important clues about who you are as an artist
Defining Drawing
Essentially, drawing is the act of applying marks to a surface. A drawing is usually made up of lines and tones on paper, but it hasn’t always been that way and it isn’t always that way today (see the following sections for more details). However you define drawing, it’s important to keep in mind that drawing is a verb; it’s an action that you do. No matter what tools you use to draw, the act of drawing is the same: You move your hand/arm/whole body while holding a mark making tool and leave traces of your movement on your drawing surface.
Looking back at the first drawings
The earliest known drawings are the ancient pictures of animals and figures made with natural pigments on the rocky walls of caves, as shown in Figure 1-1. These drawings predate written history and are some of the oldest records of what human life was like as many as 30,000 years ago. The Egyptians used drawings to create the pictograms that later became one of the first systems of writing
For hundreds of years, drawing has been a functional craft as well as an artistic practice. People have long used drawing to communicate, tell stories, plan paint ings, design architecture, and a whole lot more. The resulting drawings have become beautiful artifacts of the human experience over time
Surveying current drawing trends
Take a look around. Drawing is everywhere and it takes many forms. As with any other art form, drawing reflects the life and times of the culture. Art critics and historians are people whose job it is to take the pulse of the art of a particular place and time. It’s easier in some ways to do this when you’re looking at the art of the past. Just as it might seem like a safe choice to focus on trying to draw like Michel angelo or Leonardo da Vinci — artists whose greatness has already been sanc tioned by the art world — it’s exciting to look at the art that’s being made now too. Doing so gives you a lens for learning something about what it means to be a person in your time. It just might be even better to see yourself and the way you draw as part of the fabric of your time, too. It’s a risk to go your own way but if you stay open and receptive to riding the waves of the present, who knows what wonderful places you’ll get to go in your work
Anais Nin said, “Life is a process of becoming, a combination of states we have to go through. Where people fail is that they wish to elect a state and remain in it. This is a kind of death.” (Check out Chapter 2 for details on how to see the world as an artist and Part 3 for lots of info on the different subject matter you can draw.)
Examining the Motivation behind Drawing
The desire to draw comes with being human. Children are voracious drawers, and although most people draw less often after childhood, they still encounter draw ing occasionally when they’re doodling in the margins of a notepad during a long lecture or plotting out their gardens for the year. You know instinctively how to connect your hand and brain to make marks on a drawing surface. Add a little motivation to that instinct, and you have everything you need to be great at draw ing. So where do you find this motivation? The following sections show you some different ways you can use drawing and a few important benefits you can get from it
Finding uses for drawing
As you probably already know, the act of drawing is great for planning things out, but you can also use it to create portraits, landscapes, cartoons, and still life draw ings. No matter what you choose to create through drawing, it’s important to remember that drawing doesn’t have to be a super-serious process that leads to a product worthy of the history books. Something about the act of drawing just feels good — even if the product you make is whimsical, temporary, or just plain silly.
If you ever feel overwhelmed by the seriousness of your drawing endeavors, give yourself a break and make some playful drawings. The following is a list of alter native, playful uses for drawing, just in case you need some inspiration
Use decorator icing to draw portraits of your friends or co-workers on cakes or cookies . (Keep in mind that realism isn’t as important as creativity!)
Use thread to draw on your pillowcases . (Yes, I’m talking about embroidering here .)
Draw with your non-dominant hand . If you’re left-handed, see what happens to your drawings if you put your pencil in your right hand . If you’re right handed, try using your left hand
Draw with your feet . (Warning: This can get a little messy! Put a large sheet of paper on the floor. Dust your feet with powdered charcoal and walk around on the paper to make marks . See if you can make a somewhat realistic drawing using your feet. Check out Chapters 10 through 13 for ideas about making realistic drawings of various subjects .)
Try a blind contour drawing . Blind contour drawing is where you draw the contour of an object without looking at your paper . Choose an object to draw . Decide where you want it to go on your paper . If the object is taller than it is wide, set your paper up vertically . If the object is wider than it is tall, a horizontal orientation makes sense . Next, decide on a place to start on the edge of your object . Touch your pencil down on the paper in a corresponding spot (bottom-left side of object/bottom-left side of paper, etc .)
Before you start drawing, remember you won’t be looking at your paper at all so it will be helpful to keep your pencil in contact with the paper the entire time . Okay, your pencil is on the paper, look at the object . Just stare at the spot where you want to start . Imagine that your pencil is actually on the object . Very slowly begin to move your eye around the contour of the object and, while doing so, move your pencil on the paper, tracing the movement of your eye with the pencil . Try to forget about the paper and pretend your pencil is tracing the object . A good way to visualize this is to imagine moving the cursor on your computer by moving your finger on the trackpad or manipulating your mouse
Draw in the sand or snow
Arrange rocks or plants to form lines in your garden, creating a different kind of drawing
Considering the benefits of drawing
Drawing is satisfying on so many levels: mentally, physiologically, emotionally, and socially. After all, when you draw, your mind reaches through your hand to make direct contact with the world. When you draw from observation, you have the opportunity to physically re-create what you see. It’s like you’re touching the subject with your pencil and exploring all its subtleties. No matter how your draw ing turns out, when you draw something, you feel like you know it better when you’re done than you did before you drew it.
Drawing helps you think and process thoughts. Your imagination can be quite fluid and fragmentary, moving from one partially formed idea to another and back again in rapid succession. Drawing out your ideas gives them tangible form and some level of permanence. Even if the form isn’t exactly what you were thinking about, having a drawing to work with gives you something you can hold on to and manipulate.
Drawing is a whole-body experience. Your hand is the most obvious player, but pay attention the next time you draw. Notice the way your arms and shoulders move when you draw and the way your spine supports and responds to the move ment. When you stand at an easel to draw, you find yourself falling into a dance like rhythm — drawing, stepping back to check your drawing, stepping forward again to draw some more, and so on. If you sit when drawing, you still develop a physical rhythm. Regardless of where you draw, the process of drawing is a workout — which explains why you sometimes feel exhausted at the end of a drawing session. I can’t say drawing is a substitute for a jog around the park, but you’ll certainly feel like you’ve done something after you draw
Emotionally speaking, drawing is somewhat of a mixed bag. But even though a frustrating drawing will sometimes leave you feeling upset if not outright distraught, the emotional benefits you get from drawing far outweigh the costs. Consider the following
The physiological benefits of drawing are part of the emotional benefits. Moving around to draw and tensing and releasing your muscles is exercise and, according to research, exercise can elevate your mood
Learning to draw boosts your overall confidence. As your drawing skills improve, your confidence grows, and greater confidence makes the tougher drawing days easier to manage
The feeling you get from making a mark in response to something you see and knowing that the mark is just right makes all the work you put into your drawings worth it . If you catch it just right, even the curve of a vase can be one of the most exhilarating things you’ve ever seen!
Because drawing is a solitary activity, it may seem like an unlikely source of social benefits. However, because drawing is a solitary activity that generates questions and excitement, you’ll likely be itching to talk to people about your drawings as you create and finish them. Enthusiasm is contagious!
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