Here's some advice for new artists - and anyone else who is struggling
How to make starting to draw a whole lot easier. First off, why do you want to start drawing?
Wait, let me rephrase that — you probably don’t want to start drawing. You want to be really good
at drawing. To pick up a pen, grab some paper, and effortlessly draw anything, perfectly,
beautifully, dazzling your friends and confounding your enemies. You want to be the next daVinci.
You want to knock out portraits indistinguishable from photographs
You want to replace your vacation snapshots with
breathtaking watercolors, to have gallerists, collectors and reviewers clamoring outside the
doors of your sunswept Tuscan studio. And you have to start somewhere.
But deep down, you fear that you’ll never get to be great.
It’ll be too hard, you’ll just give up, and instead of pride,
you’ll be besieged by self-recrimination. Your dust-covered sketchbook will be just
one more reminder of your failed attempts to achieve your dreams.
It doesn’t have to be that way. Seriously. Here’s how I know.
I’ve been helping folks to start drawing for ages but more importantly, I have helped myself
to start drawing. And by teaching myself,
I have learned a few things that could help you to get past those first few challenging steps.
So this video is less about drawing techniques than it is how to incorporate drawing
into your life, how to keep yourself motivated, and how to learn to learn.
Let’s start with this:
How to accurately measure your progress: So many beginning artists are so focussed
on the horizon, that they trip over their own feet and fall flat.
They start out by focusing on the end result of learning,
that perfect drawing, then they despair when each line they make fails to achieve that goal.
What they’re overlooking are all the individual steps they are already making
towards that far-off goal, the small but crucial improvements they are making every day.
I know this because it happened to me too. Early on, I’d flip through my first handful
of pages and groan. Ugggh They all sucked. I sucked. And I’d never get any better.
But, if I’d been paying attention, if I’d been willing to be objective instead of
brutally critical, I would have noticed how much actual progress I’d been making.
That my lines were a bit more confident.
That I’d had the guts to tackle complex new subjects I’d never drawn before.
That I was starting to see how to really see. When I look back on my early sketchbooks now,
I can see that, even after a month or two, I was getting better and better.
But at the time, all I could think was: “I will never get there.”
Why? Because instead of comparing me with me, I was comparing me with Leonardo da Vinci,
or with my friend the professional illustrator, with all the artists who’d inspired me
to want to start to draw. The first bar was way too high.
I’d just started to jog around the block and I was
beating myself up for not running a marathon in under three hours.
You’ve got to recognize that your judgement of your own progress
is not really accurate. I guarantee you are doing better than you think you are because,
again, your perspective is distorted by this dream you have of where you want to get to.
And because you feel like an impostor who’s pretending to be an Artist but
can’t draw a stick figure. So you’ve got to stop obsessing
over how far you still have to travel and check out the ground you’ve already covered.
Spend less time on self-criticism and more on your next drawing.
Alright next up How to draw like a natural:
Don’t skip ahead. Keep working on the
basics. Draw simple objects. Draw your lunch. Draw a shoe. Just stick to using a black pen.
Don’t plunge into photorealistic portraiture or three-point perspective or
advanced watercoloring techniques. Develop your confidence in the basic building
blocks of drawing: lines, angles, measurements. And if you can’t quite capture what you’re
seeing yet, write down your observations. Draw an arrow to the drawing that explains
how the shadow looks, point out the highlight, record what you are learning.
Just the act of writing information down, helps your memory retain it.
Then look for other examples of what you’ve observed.
The more actively you engage, the more the lessons become second nature.
And that’s really where you want to be, to be able to draw without having to think,
to intuitively translate what you see into lines on the page.
But be realistic about what you can achieve right now.
It’s like learning to walk, to tie your shoe, to throw a ball, to drive a car,
it takes lots of repetition to build the neural connections that make a new skill feel natural.
Next, let’s discuss How to motivate yourself:
Of course, you need to practice but if you don’t want to practice, you won’t.
It’s crucial to stay motivated. One way is to set yourself small
goals that you know you can achieve. For instance, do one drawing every day.
Even if it’s just for two minutes, pick up that pen.
Or commit to filling an entire sketchbook in the next month.
Then celebrate by buying a new art tool.
I spent a year drawing with one type of black pen. A year!
Then I allowed myself one grey brush marker. A month later,
I added a different grey, and slowly worked my way up to a bag full of color markers over a year.
The next year, I bought myself a cheap watercolor set.
The year after that, a really good watercolor set, and so on.
Try focussing on a single daily subject for a month.
Pick a subject you find interesting but don’t try to make an “art statement.”
It’s just a theme to practice variations upon. I drew my teacup every single morning. I drew
a selfie every day. The view out my kitchen window. Cars on my block. A photo from the
front page of the newspaper. A dog every day. I get a sense of accomplishment when I see how
much I’m drawing, not just how “well” I am drawing, whatever that means.
Whenever you complete a sketchbook, spend some time with it.
Look back at each page, study what you did, how your work has changed.
Get out your phone and make a video as you flip through the pages.
Share it online with friends who you can trust.
Their support and encouragement will help keep you going.
Three facts to write in the inside cover of your sketchbook:
1. Never compare yourself to other artists. Don’t compare your first drawing to their
reproduction in a coffee table book. Let their progress inspire but not intimidate you.
Compare you to you. That’s all that counts. 2. You’re making more progress than you think.
You may not see it but it’s happening with every page. Guaranteed.
3. Everyone struggles at the beginning. Check out early van Gogh drawings. Awful.
Struggle is normal, it’s inevitable, it’s a positive sign that you’re working through things.
Your early drawings are zero indication of what you will achieve in time. Zero.
I hope this helps. And I hope you'll remember, you can do it.
If you need more motivation to make art, sign up for my weekly essay.
And if you’d like more help to develop your drawing,
drop by SketchbookSkool.com. There’s even a class that's called
“How to Draw Without Talent” that’ll get anyone on the way to drawing anything.