I read an article that said a pencil can write 35 miles.
35 miles! I’m sure that can’t be true.
But the idea got me thinking about how keen we are to judge our drawing efforts before we’ve had time to develop our skills.
Many people give up on drawing after just a few attempts, declaring, “I can’t draw” or “I have no natural talent.” way too early on in the actual drawing practice.
That’s like judging your fitness level after a week of walking around the block, so it’d be easy to do a couple of drawings that don’t quite work out.
Drawing, like any skill, takes time and practice to develop.
A method that can help is to look at a non-emotional record of progress. It can help you keep calm and not critically self-assess your work until you’ve done a much larger body of work.
In the beginner’s drawing course, I recommend hiding your first attempts in an envelope to look back on in the future.
When progress in developing any skill is incremental, it can be helpful to have clear times to have a check-in on how things are going and to look back and see what has improved.
35 miles is a lot of shading; that’s 1,000s of contours and a bucket load of erasers!
My proposal in the last post was to try a personal New Year creative experiment.
Just one format, one medium, one subject.
I’ve been focusing on portrait structure, and anatomy with pencil on paper.
Morning Sketches from Jan 2025
Morning Sketches from Jan 2025
Morning Sketches from Jan 2025
There’s a whole story and a whole journey that would have come out of one pencil.
Not only do I remember the sketches that went well, but lots of smudging, erasing and relooking. I also remember how the sun was streaming in through the studio window when I sat down to do the third sketch and the croissant I was going to buy after my practice.
If you’re drawing with pen and ink, put a little pot on the side for empty ink cartridges.
Keep a bin for used-up paint tubes – not to judge the work but to celebrate a dedication to practice. I think it’s a nice idea just to think in terms of evidence; every artist’s journey is made up of these small records.
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