This art thing was supposed to be fun, wasn’t it?͏ ‌     ­ ͏ ‌     ­ ͏ ‌     ­ ͏ ‌     ­ ͏ ‌     ­ ͏ ‌     ­ ͏ ‌     ­ ͏ ‌     ­ This newsletter is about drawing. It goes out every Friday. Want to draw? Then check out my free workbook!

#56 - Be Like A Child Again

This art thing was supposed to be fun, wasn’t it?

 

When my daughter was around two, I remember that she was drawing, and I decided to draw along with her. I took a color pencil, and I started to make lines on the same paper.

Soon enough, our pencils crossed, and a “sword fight” ensued. That is when I realized that she wasn’t concentrating on the drawing. She was still fascinated by the fact that she could put down a pencil and make a mark.

 
My Favorite Drawing Exercises

For this week’s challenge, try to be a child again who draws for the first time. Just look at the marks you make as you make them. Be in awe of just these marks. Forget about the drawing.

This might sound like a touchy-feely thing, but try it! It works great wonders to help you not take things as seriously.

Hi friend,
This week, I have been contemplating making a slight change in direction for Practice Drawing this. I was thinking that maybe we could do a weekly drawing exercise! The newsletter is great, but I need to draw more too and I thought that maybe I could make that the center of the newsletter again.

The idea would be for me, or one of you, to pick one reference image, and pick it apart. We’d draw it from observation, from memory, study it for storytelling, see if we can simplify and idealize it in ways, maybe even go for a cartoon or manga style after we drew it realistically, change proportions and such, maybe turn something into a character design, or try to draw it from another angle, try to understand the underlying volumes, stick the details onto other volumes, et cetera.

Just slow down and study one reference image for a week. Life online is making us too restless. With our short attention spans, we don’t stop to enjoy things as much any more.

We could use the Practice Drawing This Subreddit—which I guess has been a bit dormant for a while—to post things. I could do draw-overs for people who were interested. If the subreddit thing worked, I think I’d build something that would run on my website, but Reddit is already there for us to try it on.

I just feel like my newsletter has been about things adjacent to drawing lately, and I think it should be about drawing again. It would also make the name of the website make sense again: Practice Drawing This: we deep-dive into one reference image and pick it apart to learn from it. Which parts do you need to draw really accurately, and which parts can you render with flourish and abandon? Which details can we leave out? Can we imagine new details?

I’ve written a few short guides this week:

one on dexterity warm-up drawing exercises .

One on drawing from memory because it truly is a Swiss army knife for practicing.

And one about maintaining a creative habit .

I think that’s actually all that it should be, right? You form a creative habit, you warm up, and you draw.

I feel like maybe if I keep it simple on the website, maybe I get to draw more, and hopfully you too.

What do you think?

 

Related

Sketchbook Skool is a great YouTube channel that gets you to just draw and have fun with it. The Channel is by Danny Gregory who also wrote the book An Illustrated Life: Drawing Inspiration from the Private Sketchbooks of Artists, Illustrators and Designers .

This videos, What Destroys the Joy of Drawing And Ways to Fix It , has some great thoughts on why you should try to be like a child again when drawing.

I also created a post on how to create a sustainable artistic habit .

 
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