Sometime in the past five years I made an unconscious effort to learn to draw (again). In college, where I was a graphic design student, the drawing 1 professor made me feel as though my drawings were somehow less than because I was not in the fine arts program, but instead in the commercial arts program. I stopped drawing after that class ended, and I’m not blaming the professor, but her attitude had an impact on me. It seemed not worth my time to pursue it any longer. You don’t actually have to be in any sort of formal arts program at all to draw, or to be “good at drawing.” Which is a fact I really didn’t consider until later in life.
When I was visiting San Francisco I picked up this book, Drawing for the Absolute and Utter Beginner by Claire Watson Garcia. I have not even completed the lessons from the whole book, but it was a permission slip! To be new at drawing and to keep drawing no matter what it looked like.
A few other things entered my awareness that helped to firm up my practice:
Last year I subscribed to DrawTogether with
and delightfully joined Wendy and the thousands of other drawers in the 30 Day Drawing Habit.Through that group I discovered Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, a book by Betty Edwards that has a lot of the same lessons as the book by Claire Watson Garcia (mentioned above).
I saw the Ruth Asawa show at The Whitney and learned that she had a daily drawing practice that she kept up while raising six (6!) kids, and that you can always draw what’s around you.
I looked through old sketchbooks from that class in college and realized that I knew how to draw all along. (Also in that sketchbook is the cell phone number of the aforementioned professor…should I text her my drawings??)
Just last week I saw this post by Lindsay Stripling and duh! The only way to have a daily drawing practice is to draw everyday.
I read Lynda Barry’s Syllabus which really encourages you (and her students) to embrace the bad drawings, and understand that even a bad drawing can communicate. Also in here is a very good case for using simple, affordable tools like a composition book and crayons!
The last thing is that I only recently realized that I draw more in cheaper notebooks. I am the type that wouldn’t want to “waste paper” with a “bad drawing” so I just won’t draw if I’m feeling precious about the sketchbook. Cheap tools for the win!
All this to say, it’s working! I don’t draw every single day, but most days I can find 5-10 minutes and at least doodle a bit. So I’ll keep going and check back in a year!
That’s it! See you next Sunday :)
Bekka