My mother had a drawing on the fridge in the basement when I was a kid, it was a still life of shoes. It was drawn done by her I found out out years later, a talent my mother never fully pursued. Life got in the way kids, work, etc. but she always encouraged the arts in her kids, I took drawing classes at the Royal Ontario Museum in the summers with my friends Jeremy and Michael, some of my fondest memories as a kid. Drawing for me too eventually became a talent not fully pursued. Then I had a child, Abby, and I realized the power of the little things in life, the subtle nudges you get growing up, the drawings on a fridge, and realized that I should leave some of my own. So recently I decided to relearn how to draw, here is what I did and how I got there.

The What & The How

The internet and the public library are powerful tools to learn just about anything, setting aside the time to learn is the hard part but like anything if it is important to you, you will find the time. My three best resources are the book You Can Draw Anything, by Kim Gamble, the online course Drawing Foundations: Fundamentals by Will Kemp, and my Pinterest Drawing Board.  What worked for me was watching, reading, and practicing, the last part took the longest.  Besides practice the three biggest things I learned from these resources:

1. Circles, Squares and shapes are great aids in drawing.

2. An eraser is a tool to help you draw.

3. Quiet the left side of your brain when drawin, it does not help.

One of the best exercises in Kim Gamble’s book was drawing an elephant inside a rectangle using the least amount of lines.  The rectangle helps keep the proportions by defining an area, and simplifying your drawing to the fewest lines possible reveals that less is often more.  Will Kemp and the how tos on Pinterest also talk about the using shapes to help define a person or thing while drawing.  It is the initial steps, drawn lightly, that you build upon later with thicker more confident lines.  

Will Kemp’s course is a great intro to the basic skills and tools for drawing. For me his use of the eraser to help define a drawing by subtraction was amazing as I realized that negative space plays such an important roll in drawing and that it is alright to make mistakes. The proper tools are extremely important to use but do not need to be expensive a 3B pencil, eraser and note pad will run you about $10 dollars. 

A brilliant exercise by Will Kemp is drawing a tree, we all when starting out draw the same child like illustration of a tree that looks more like broccoli.  This is the left side of our brain drawing from memory, utilizing what we know as a kid.  The left side is logical and corrective and surfaces when we begin to struggle to help us make “sense” of things.  To truly see and draw something you need to let go of this side and, for lack of a better phrase, go with the flow when drawing. 

Some Work

I am surrounded by kids books and some have amazing illustrations so I have been drawing some of favs.