#190 - Learning To Draw, Kids Have An Unfair Advantage
Practice Drawing This Draw-along.
As adults, we see all the mistakes in our work. And it demotivates us.
Tom Fox mentions it in one of his online courses, too: don’t fret about mistakes in drawings. They are just drawings. You’ll make another one. As I wrote, you should go for quantity over quality , and quality will follow.
Children have it easier. But we can be like that, too! See my article on the one bad habit we have to unlearn.
Have fun in your sketchbook, and don’t fret about the mistakes.
This Week: Book Review
A new, expanded, and remastered edition of the book “The Artist’s Guide to SKETCHING” by James Gurney and Thomas Kinkade has just been released. The book is worth having for the beautiful art inside alone, but it is way more than that! Leafing through it makes you want to draw.
When James Gurney and Thomas Kinkade were young, they quit art school and went on a Grand Tour around the U.S. with a sketchbook in their backpacks. They found out that art school was all about working in a studio and drawing outside was quite different. After their tour, they wrote about everything they learned about drawing while on the go in this book.
Nowadays, plein air painting and urban sketching are more in vogue, and there are many books and courses on the subject, but it wasn’t so at that time, and this was perhaps one of the first books on it.
As soon as you hit the first chapter, The Experience of Sketching, you understand that he is writing from personal experience. It starts with dealing with bright sunlight on your sketchbook page. That’s something you only write about if you experienced it. Strangely, he doesn’t suggest working on tanned paper, which is a great option when drawing outside in the sun. Moleskines, for example, have yellowed paper that is much more pleasant to draw on in the sun than bright white paper.
Of course, a mandatory chapter on materials is among the topics discussed, but mercifully, it is chapter two. The first chapter starts by whetting your appetite, selling you on the joy of drawing outside.
The book then proceeds to answer questions like, how do you obtain accuracy in your drawing? How do you draw moving subjects like people and animals? (Memory drawing plays a role!) It has a chapter on pictorial composition and how that can help you say something about the thing you are drawing and how to draw things that move quickly, like animals. There is a fantastic chapter on drawing from imagination and a chapter on learning from nature, drawing people, drawing human-made things, and how to fit drawing into your life with lots of smaller sub-topics like maintaining multiple sketchbooks and drawing with other artists and showing your work.
If you’ve sketched outside yourself like me, you discovered most of the things mentioned in this book. Still, the book is jam-packed with interesting insights you probably hadn’t thought of. I did learn a few things from the book. And if you haven’t drawn outside yet, this is a treasure trove of information and gives a realistic idea of what it is like to draw outside while out and about.
James Gurney never returned to the art academy as a student. Instead, he launched a successful career as an artist and wrote legendary books on making art. His books are filled with insights you won’t find anywhere else.
In that respect, James Gurney’s books fascinate me as much as Marshall Vandruff’s courses do; they both explore topics independently and arrive at surprising, new, original, and highly useful new insights.
We should be doing that, too, exploring topics on our own instead of consuming the solutions other artists have devised. It will mean re-inventing the wheel, but it might also lead us into new, uncharted territories littered with new ideas waiting to be discovered.
I like going meta on art education resources; in addition to learning the material, I like to understand how they arrived at these insights, as I want to embrace their processes and discover new insights myself. Think about it: everything we learn was once discovered by someone. There was a time when no one knew about it. There is still much to be discovered, and we, you and I, can find these new ideas and insights.
Yes, read James Gurney’s books, but also explore the world of art creation on your own, like he did. Don’t just read books and tutorials; draw a lot, fail a lot, and figure out why and how to improve.
Because that is what most art books and courses are trying to tell you: draw a lot.
I highly recommend James Gurney’s other books, “Color and Light” and “Imaginative Realism.” They are in a class of their own in the subject they cover.
Art Flashcards
I added forty-four new street photography art flashcards . See a few samples in the image above. I had made lots of photos last summer, and as I went through them, I decided a few more should make the cut and be added to the art flashcards scheduler .
Statistics
I expanded on the statistics shown in the Art Flashcards system . I chose statistics that hopefully motivate me to keep drawing. You can see the statistics at the bottom of the art flashcards page .
Specifically, one of the statistics shown is the number of days.
You’ve probably heard of the “don’t break the streak” system; I even made a tool for it here . The idea is to have a calendar and mark every day you draw and to make sure you put a mark on every day, not breaking the streak. When you break the streak, you start anew from zero. But it doesn’t work. If you’ve tried it, you’ll know what I mean: you start, draw every day, and then draw day after day, and the days add up. You draw for 100 days, 112 days, until, one day, life happens, and you can’t draw, and you break the streak, and you have to start from scratch, from zero.
And you never do a streak again. That is because it is incredibly demotivating to lose a streak. It’s hard enough already to keep a drawing habit going. You don’t need additional reasons to be demotivated.
DuoLingo does this, too. It tries to entice you into maintaining a streak, sending heart-tugging emails when you are about to break a streak, and when you invariably need to break a streak because life happens, you never start a streak again. Grammarly has streaks, too. You learn never to engage in a streak ever again. Life will happen, and you will have to break the streak and don’t need more discouragement.
It is also incorrect. You don’t lose those days. You did practice those days. You did train your muscle memory on those days, and you don’t lose that training when you skip a day. You might be a bit rusty after not having drawn for a while, but it returns soon, after a few hours or days. Your muscle memory still works.
The “don’t break the streak” method does not accurately measure progress and can be demotivating.
My art flashcard system shows the total number of days you drew. It doesn’t go down. If you skip a few days, the count continues, it doesn’t reset to zero.
You can also see how many drawings you made today and for how long you drew. I typically make 20-30 drawings a day, which I thought was a surprisingly high number, and draw for 1-2 hours, which was a surprisingly low number. I stop drawing when the drawings stop coming out well or when I feel exhausted.
It also shows total numbers, such as the hours you drew. That way, you can see how far along you are on the path of drawing for 10,000 hours.
There is this famous but incorrect theory that it takes ten thousand hours for you to become good at something. It’s wrong because it is the wrong way around. You need to focus on having fun, and the ten thousand, twenty thousand, thirty thousand hours follow as a corollary. You won’t make the first ten thousand hours if you don’t have fun.
Still, seeing how many hours you have drawn can be motivating.
Yours sincerely,
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