Smoke and Mirrors

Hi,

I decided to start this blog for anyone to read about the ideas behind drawing and how to gain the skills to do so. I will also be talking about other art forms, my fears, frustrations, and discoveries about them. But mostly it'll be about drawing.

I have spent my whole life drawing. From early childhood, images were a great mode to communicate and to this day I can still draw. Most people will say that it comes down to natural ability, or giftedness. I think that this "ability" presides over all of us and is very present.

Drawing can be learnt,  and this is the great part. You all have the tools to do this. You will need:

• A pair of eyes 
• A brain
• and a bunch of digits - Hands preferably but toes might do.
• and a few simple drawing tools which can be found at home, pens, pencils, sharpeners, paper and some time.
• A desire to learn to draw
• Patience to keep perservering.

So you think I am nuts? I probably am but I also know that people stop believing in themselves when they grow up. Nothing is perfect, no one is ever happy with how they look, but have you actually really looked? This is something that I think is the key to gaining understanding and drawing. Looking.

You can try to draw something but without actually looking at it, it will not come out as descriptive or convincingly. Funny thing is that looking is an art and a skill that needs to be learnt. I am part of a group of artists (novice to advanced) and I work alongside them to help them to become better at looking. This is called Co-constructing and is a theory developed by a man called Lev Vygotsky. What this means is that learning cannot occur entirely in isolation and that other people can show and teach you things that you never thought about.

So here's a task. This is one of the very first tasks I ever did at university level illustration classes. Take a paper, and using lines (if you can write or scribble you can do this), draw a traffic light. Then take your drawing, and go and find an actual traffic light, and look at the shapes, the dimensions, the height, the angles and the wires. Did you draw them? Does it really look the way you drew the traffic light? Probably not.

What this shows you is that your perception of what an item should look like usually is very different from what it actually looks like. So the first lesson for today is never assume that you know what something looks like until you really look at it closely. It may be more different than you think!