do not laugh at me but i actually thought YOU DREW hte apple at the top of the email. like you'd improved at it, and this is what you came up with. only after i read the whole thing did i look back and see it was PICASSO. i know that is beside your whole point burt HAHAHA.
I took a class in community college where we used charcoal sticks to draw naked people on butcher paper every Wednesday (one model wore a c**k ring when he modeled, so talk about an exciting class lol)
The process of drawing is also about experimentation…I imagine a class breaking down the fundamentals of writing might also put someone to sleep. Sitting down and starting to scribble is also a good place to start IMO. I recommend the book Syllabus by Lynda Barry!!
. I went to an art college for a bit and the drawing teacher there would complain that I 'drew like a child'; the digital arts teacher there saw my sketches and told me my style was 'graphic and bold, perfect for design or animation'. So... different 'experts' have different eyes on these things.
. In terms of being bad at something but enjoying it - I took up skateboarding at the age of 36. Went to weekly group classes. It took me about 3 times as long to pick things up as the others, but I relished the challenge of learning something new, moving my body in a new way, and when I finally did get a trick or be able to drop in to a higher ramp, it felt like such an achievement. I skated for about 4 years, then fizzled off it due to a bad back injury (and got into dance, which I love). But the community, girls skate events, little day trips we took to other skate parks... all cherished memories, totally worth it, no matter how mediocre or slow my skating was💗
Gah. I was a Waldorf teacher and I was always terrible at drawing, painting etc. Its still rough for me to recall how baaaadd I was at that "remove your imagination" part bc I'm still so pissed that a pedagogy which is based on effin imagination ( + other woo woo stuff that I like) made me draw ALL THE DAMN TIME. Were also Waldorf parents and I once called my easy-going, good-at-perspective-changes-and-experiened-shader husband "Shady McShaderson" in a loud grumpy voice during drawing at Parents Night. He laughed but the teacher did not. I'm still really bad at drawing & shading makes me mad. So now I will go write in my stupid journal where I DO like my handwriting!
The last oil painting class I took, the teacher insisted on teaching us to draw. He (Richard Kirk) broke it down into very understandable steps that included using a ruler and a graphing method. Drawing is not as satisfying or interesting as slapping oil paint onto a canvas, but I did learn quite a bit.
Pollyyyyy!!!! I need to write this comment because you’ve been so helpful about pushing through writing blocks etc, and how you feel about writing is how I feel about drawing.
You CAN NOT be bad at drawing. It’s just not possible!
What I hear, as an ~illustrator and ~artist with a certified degree in "drawing", who just woke up to my 7th rejection this year to a residency— which once again had a "record breaking" "high number of talented applicants"— and arrived a couple minutes before you published this newsletter, is that your drawings simply don’t look the way you want them to. But they are defo not bad. Because drawings can not be bad.
I don't think art of any medium can be bad, unless it was made by AI. And this is the result of learning how to draw and then learning how boring that is and wishing I could make more abstract pieces but being chained to the algorithm of representational art and very technically skilled abstract artists and not being able to fuck around nor find out without feeling like a FAILURE.
The biggest challenge to visual art is being able to stomach that a drawing or painting didn't come out the way you wanted it to. It's different than writing and music, which you can delete from the world by not playing it anymore, or removing a file from your computer. But it IS sexy! Think about all the sexy fucked up visual artists toiling away in their studios and getting scurvy and dying or going insane from the heavy metals in their supplies and... you know what I mean!!!
Your teacher, however, sounds very bad at explaining how she draws an apple. Which is troubling only if you want to draw an apple exactly like your teacher.
When I learned how to draw, which wasn't until in my 20s, I had an extremely hot extraordinarily talented illustrator instructor that I paid a LOT of money to in the form of an illustration degree— that I dropped out of!!! Who was the perfect level of inspiring, criticizing and healthy shame to encouragement. He taught “Observational drawing”, something which he emphasized was simply a skill where you train your brain and hand to copy the world around you.
We did a lot of still life drawing and he was very good at explaining how your eye and hand can sync up and you can create a decent rendering of any apple in the world.
We also took color theory classes and material classes and many other classes where rendering reality was not the key to a passing grade, and you could see in those classes where there were draftsmanship and where it was lacking, but the technically skilled at rendering any apple in the world artists were not always the most successful pieces on crit day! Far from it!
In your case, I know that you love abstract art. Visual Artists were FREED from the torment of having to recreate a scene as depicted in the real world from the invention of the camera, and now all your drawings of apples can be weird and messy and not look anything like your lazy teacher's (who, if she's an illustrator, probably has a whole maze of crazy internalized bullshit about art and drawing that she works through all the time) and have it still be a good drawing of an apple.
That's why I would highly recommend “The Syllabus” or “What It Is” by Lynda Barry. The Syllabus is her hand drawn syllabus for her drawing classes for non-artists at a university level to encourage creativity in general. She's incredible and it's the only place I recommend people start if they want to learn how to draw.
I guarantee you though if you keep practicing and learning drawing though you'll wish you had these weird apples from this shitty class.
I'm a professional artist with an art degree and I HATE having people tell me how to draw. Every time I take a class, it's a battle. I'm always like...ok, that's how YOU draw, but what does it have to do with me?
I've managed to pick up a few tricks from teachers here and there over the years, but most of my career has been choosing to be bad at art my own way rather than be good at art someone else's way.
Polly, I think the people who are commenting saying "you could be good at drawing with a different learning approach" are technically correct, but also wrong about something important. If someone truly desires to draw, and if drawing was their true medium, they would already be drawing. Nothing could even STOP them from drawing. It's like you with writing. Somehow it always happens, in some form. Obviously there are some people who pick up sketching as an enjoyable/meaningful hobby later in life, but there's always something a bit contained about that kind of art which doesn't appeal to me. I love the art that is so desperate to come out, it's happy to be wrong while it does it.
Yoga is my version of this, I’m genuinely terrible at it and I keep doing it anyways because nothing makes me feel better or calmer. Writing is the opposite for me. I loved it as a kid and then somewhere along the way I got told it wasn’t practical, and I lost it for years. A fog lifted recently after a long grief and I’ve felt compelled to write again, like something came back that I didn’t realize I’d lost. Coming back to art with my kids has done the same thing, I used to love drawing and it turns out I still do. I think a lot of us quietly abandoned the things we loved most because someone told us we weren’t good enough or it wasn’t serious enough. And then one day something shifts and you find your way back, usually through a side door you weren’t expecting. I hope to keep discovering new hobbies I love and coming back to old ones I let go.
Your description of your drawing class is giving a vibe I felt recently. I wasn't sure it was so, and I'm pretty sure I'm missing a lot, but.
I had the thought that the reason painters started with still-life studies was to learn to paint what they saw, to treat their subjects as objects, free from feeling. Once the painter was skilled enough to capture an apple, the next step would be a hand, a torso, eventually moving to something trickier like a face. The ultimate would be people and scenes with people, right? But no, in a pattern I inhabit, I disappointed myself again by realizing I had missed the ultimate target, painting people or places and capturing the feelings of being in the place and of the people in the painting. I guess that you can only paint that way after you have worked your way up. But, I wonder about that. I wonder what it looks like to see a prodigy born, one in the visual arts. Do they pick up a pencil and cut right to the essence with a few lines and a little hatching on the page? what do the natives do?
I know I get way too emotional trying to draw people. Stick figures, sure. Real people, too much.
I remember watching my boyfriend (now husband) grinding out learning how to draw 10 years ago and thinking how absolutely insane the effort was. Now he's pretty good, and has since begun painting as well. We've been traveling, and watching him do these fun little sketches/watercolors of places we go was SO intoxicating to me. Suddenly this winter (would you believe, perfectly aligned with stalling-out on a first draft and feeling ambivalent about something else I was "done" with), it felt like painting and drawing was the most important thing in the world, words were insufficient!!! WHAT COULD BE BETTER than sketching!
My husband was so enthusiastic! Get a sketchbook! It will be great! So I tried sketching some small version of photos of landscapes I had taken. That was actually pretty fun. But the instant I tried to make it larger than a thumbnail, more than an impression, to actually draw something of any complexity? Yeah. My husband has totally forgotten how hard it is and underestimates how much work he has put in. (And I did too, even though I was there, watching the whole process.)
I may still keep my little thumbnail-landscapes practice. But I think I have to return to my words. :)
You had me at the tag line - and I'm responding without reading further, because it's a powerful, important tag line!
I've always complained to myself that I had no imagination.
But the reality was and is that I limited my imagination based on intentional experience, deep and broad. It's what helped me be a professional problem solver, regardless of industry. The kicker is why I chose experience over fantasy: I grew up with harsh fallacy such that I committed to experiencing as much as I dared of life, THEN deciding what was true and not true, doable and not doable, and so on.
Having lived so, for better and for worse, I find that I wish everyone "treated their imagination to a strong dose of reality."
Sorry to hear you had a bad experience at your class. I run drawing classes online and in-person. Check out the reviews and if you like the sound of what we offer, please join us! www.nowdraw.co.uk
do not laugh at me but i actually thought YOU DREW hte apple at the top of the email. like you'd improved at it, and this is what you came up with. only after i read the whole thing did i look back and see it was PICASSO. i know that is beside your whole point burt HAHAHA.
I love drawing but that sounds boring!!
I took a class in community college where we used charcoal sticks to draw naked people on butcher paper every Wednesday (one model wore a c**k ring when he modeled, so talk about an exciting class lol)
You deserve a fun drawing class!
The process of drawing is also about experimentation…I imagine a class breaking down the fundamentals of writing might also put someone to sleep. Sitting down and starting to scribble is also a good place to start IMO. I recommend the book Syllabus by Lynda Barry!!
2 things -
. I went to an art college for a bit and the drawing teacher there would complain that I 'drew like a child'; the digital arts teacher there saw my sketches and told me my style was 'graphic and bold, perfect for design or animation'. So... different 'experts' have different eyes on these things.
. In terms of being bad at something but enjoying it - I took up skateboarding at the age of 36. Went to weekly group classes. It took me about 3 times as long to pick things up as the others, but I relished the challenge of learning something new, moving my body in a new way, and when I finally did get a trick or be able to drop in to a higher ramp, it felt like such an achievement. I skated for about 4 years, then fizzled off it due to a bad back injury (and got into dance, which I love). But the community, girls skate events, little day trips we took to other skate parks... all cherished memories, totally worth it, no matter how mediocre or slow my skating was💗
Gah. I was a Waldorf teacher and I was always terrible at drawing, painting etc. Its still rough for me to recall how baaaadd I was at that "remove your imagination" part bc I'm still so pissed that a pedagogy which is based on effin imagination ( + other woo woo stuff that I like) made me draw ALL THE DAMN TIME. Were also Waldorf parents and I once called my easy-going, good-at-perspective-changes-and-experiened-shader husband "Shady McShaderson" in a loud grumpy voice during drawing at Parents Night. He laughed but the teacher did not. I'm still really bad at drawing & shading makes me mad. So now I will go write in my stupid journal where I DO like my handwriting!
The last oil painting class I took, the teacher insisted on teaching us to draw. He (Richard Kirk) broke it down into very understandable steps that included using a ruler and a graphing method. Drawing is not as satisfying or interesting as slapping oil paint onto a canvas, but I did learn quite a bit.
Pollyyyyy!!!! I need to write this comment because you’ve been so helpful about pushing through writing blocks etc, and how you feel about writing is how I feel about drawing.
You CAN NOT be bad at drawing. It’s just not possible!
What I hear, as an ~illustrator and ~artist with a certified degree in "drawing", who just woke up to my 7th rejection this year to a residency— which once again had a "record breaking" "high number of talented applicants"— and arrived a couple minutes before you published this newsletter, is that your drawings simply don’t look the way you want them to. But they are defo not bad. Because drawings can not be bad.
I don't think art of any medium can be bad, unless it was made by AI. And this is the result of learning how to draw and then learning how boring that is and wishing I could make more abstract pieces but being chained to the algorithm of representational art and very technically skilled abstract artists and not being able to fuck around nor find out without feeling like a FAILURE.
The biggest challenge to visual art is being able to stomach that a drawing or painting didn't come out the way you wanted it to. It's different than writing and music, which you can delete from the world by not playing it anymore, or removing a file from your computer. But it IS sexy! Think about all the sexy fucked up visual artists toiling away in their studios and getting scurvy and dying or going insane from the heavy metals in their supplies and... you know what I mean!!!
Your teacher, however, sounds very bad at explaining how she draws an apple. Which is troubling only if you want to draw an apple exactly like your teacher.
When I learned how to draw, which wasn't until in my 20s, I had an extremely hot extraordinarily talented illustrator instructor that I paid a LOT of money to in the form of an illustration degree— that I dropped out of!!! Who was the perfect level of inspiring, criticizing and healthy shame to encouragement. He taught “Observational drawing”, something which he emphasized was simply a skill where you train your brain and hand to copy the world around you.
We did a lot of still life drawing and he was very good at explaining how your eye and hand can sync up and you can create a decent rendering of any apple in the world.
We also took color theory classes and material classes and many other classes where rendering reality was not the key to a passing grade, and you could see in those classes where there were draftsmanship and where it was lacking, but the technically skilled at rendering any apple in the world artists were not always the most successful pieces on crit day! Far from it!
In your case, I know that you love abstract art. Visual Artists were FREED from the torment of having to recreate a scene as depicted in the real world from the invention of the camera, and now all your drawings of apples can be weird and messy and not look anything like your lazy teacher's (who, if she's an illustrator, probably has a whole maze of crazy internalized bullshit about art and drawing that she works through all the time) and have it still be a good drawing of an apple.
That's why I would highly recommend “The Syllabus” or “What It Is” by Lynda Barry. The Syllabus is her hand drawn syllabus for her drawing classes for non-artists at a university level to encourage creativity in general. She's incredible and it's the only place I recommend people start if they want to learn how to draw.
I guarantee you though if you keep practicing and learning drawing though you'll wish you had these weird apples from this shitty class.
Hope this helps!!!! Keep drawing!!!!
This was such and impactful read. Thank you for the reminder to get out of my head and into reality!
Thank you for this.
I'm a professional artist with an art degree and I HATE having people tell me how to draw. Every time I take a class, it's a battle. I'm always like...ok, that's how YOU draw, but what does it have to do with me?
I've managed to pick up a few tricks from teachers here and there over the years, but most of my career has been choosing to be bad at art my own way rather than be good at art someone else's way.
Polly, I think the people who are commenting saying "you could be good at drawing with a different learning approach" are technically correct, but also wrong about something important. If someone truly desires to draw, and if drawing was their true medium, they would already be drawing. Nothing could even STOP them from drawing. It's like you with writing. Somehow it always happens, in some form. Obviously there are some people who pick up sketching as an enjoyable/meaningful hobby later in life, but there's always something a bit contained about that kind of art which doesn't appeal to me. I love the art that is so desperate to come out, it's happy to be wrong while it does it.
Yoga is my version of this, I’m genuinely terrible at it and I keep doing it anyways because nothing makes me feel better or calmer. Writing is the opposite for me. I loved it as a kid and then somewhere along the way I got told it wasn’t practical, and I lost it for years. A fog lifted recently after a long grief and I’ve felt compelled to write again, like something came back that I didn’t realize I’d lost. Coming back to art with my kids has done the same thing, I used to love drawing and it turns out I still do. I think a lot of us quietly abandoned the things we loved most because someone told us we weren’t good enough or it wasn’t serious enough. And then one day something shifts and you find your way back, usually through a side door you weren’t expecting. I hope to keep discovering new hobbies I love and coming back to old ones I let go.
Your description of your drawing class is giving a vibe I felt recently. I wasn't sure it was so, and I'm pretty sure I'm missing a lot, but.
I had the thought that the reason painters started with still-life studies was to learn to paint what they saw, to treat their subjects as objects, free from feeling. Once the painter was skilled enough to capture an apple, the next step would be a hand, a torso, eventually moving to something trickier like a face. The ultimate would be people and scenes with people, right? But no, in a pattern I inhabit, I disappointed myself again by realizing I had missed the ultimate target, painting people or places and capturing the feelings of being in the place and of the people in the painting. I guess that you can only paint that way after you have worked your way up. But, I wonder about that. I wonder what it looks like to see a prodigy born, one in the visual arts. Do they pick up a pencil and cut right to the essence with a few lines and a little hatching on the page? what do the natives do?
I know I get way too emotional trying to draw people. Stick figures, sure. Real people, too much.
I remember watching my boyfriend (now husband) grinding out learning how to draw 10 years ago and thinking how absolutely insane the effort was. Now he's pretty good, and has since begun painting as well. We've been traveling, and watching him do these fun little sketches/watercolors of places we go was SO intoxicating to me. Suddenly this winter (would you believe, perfectly aligned with stalling-out on a first draft and feeling ambivalent about something else I was "done" with), it felt like painting and drawing was the most important thing in the world, words were insufficient!!! WHAT COULD BE BETTER than sketching!
My husband was so enthusiastic! Get a sketchbook! It will be great! So I tried sketching some small version of photos of landscapes I had taken. That was actually pretty fun. But the instant I tried to make it larger than a thumbnail, more than an impression, to actually draw something of any complexity? Yeah. My husband has totally forgotten how hard it is and underestimates how much work he has put in. (And I did too, even though I was there, watching the whole process.)
I may still keep my little thumbnail-landscapes practice. But I think I have to return to my words. :)
You had me at the tag line - and I'm responding without reading further, because it's a powerful, important tag line!
I've always complained to myself that I had no imagination.
But the reality was and is that I limited my imagination based on intentional experience, deep and broad. It's what helped me be a professional problem solver, regardless of industry. The kicker is why I chose experience over fantasy: I grew up with harsh fallacy such that I committed to experiencing as much as I dared of life, THEN deciding what was true and not true, doable and not doable, and so on.
Having lived so, for better and for worse, I find that I wish everyone "treated their imagination to a strong dose of reality."
Sorry to hear you had a bad experience at your class. I run drawing classes online and in-person. Check out the reviews and if you like the sound of what we offer, please join us! www.nowdraw.co.uk