How I Started Drawing Again

So, the other day I was talking about drawing with my friend Craig and I wondered if I still had any talent for doing so.

When I was a kid, I actually drew a lot. My favorite things to draw were ships. I’d draw them tiny but make absolutely sure to get all the details the same. I also remember loving to draw (of all things) an old barn. I drew that barn so many times as a child that I can close my eyes now and see it still.

But over the years, I drew less and less. Then I just quit. I may have been paralyzed by praise, but more likely than not I saw what they were doing in art class and wanted no part of that kind of thing.

Anyway, over the years, I’d get “the bug” for a while, draw for a week or two straight, and then give it up. More than a decade passed since that happened, however, and I would have thought it was out of my system if I thought of the subject at all.

Then The Objective Standard started its interview series with artists.

This series has so far interviewed the sculptor Sandra Shaw; a still-life artist, Linda Mann; and (just recently, to be published in the upcoming issue) a painter, Bryan Larsen.

Given my work for TOS, I was lucky enough to get paid for listening to and transcribing the taped interviews. In any case, however, in doing this I felt my old desire building up again.

This brings me back to the conversation with Craig that I mentioned at the start. 

After that ended, I had an old envelope in front of me, and a pen nearby.

So I started to draw.

It was nothing big really, just a picture of an author I like (called Ayn Rand). And I wasn’t expecting much either--which was good, because those expectations were realized. I got “a likeness” of her, but nothing much more.

The thing is, though, it felt pretty good.

So I continued.

I looked up a picture of one Sandra Shaw’s sculptures, called “Tranquility,” and I drew that quickly. It came out looking horrible! In fact, I have a name for this one, it’s called “Frumpy” and I don’t know if even that isn’t being generous.

But, again, actually creating this was good fun.

And I felt even more respect for what Shaw does.

Those lines are smooth, and sensuous, I thought, comparing them with my own. The next day, I drew the same thing again. And the day after that, I drew the same thing again. 

Professional golf players get better by repeatedly taking shots from the same places, I reasoned; it’d probably work for me, too. I’m certainly no professional, but after a few days I got to a decent “likeness” of it.

In between the above takes, I attempted to sketch “Vitality,” again by Shaw...

and then, after the Shaw copies, I tried to draw a study by Larsen:

It was in drawing the copy of Larsen’s study that I realized I didn’t know hardly anything about shading aside from just naturally making my lines look close enough like theirs to be happy.

It was in drawing the copy of Larsen’s study that I realized something else, too: You (or I) can only do so much when drawing with a pen!

Like any budding genius then I did the natural thing: I bought, wait for it, a pencil.

I figured I might as well start, as before, by drawing an author I liked—so I drew Nevil Shute.

Again, I think his face didn’t come out as long as it actually was, and it could have come out much better. But it wasn’t terribly bad--especially given the time I spent on it--and I felt that the shading was pretty good for a beginner.

Next up, I drew a painting by Leighton that I like. And, although I drew all the other ones pretty fast, I took my time on this one.

That was partly because I wanted to make good use of the pencils (now plural) that I bought and partly because I really like this painting. 

I should mention that the way I drew the old man’s face here is not as intense as Leighton has it—and that’s important. The Leighton painting is so vastly superior in a number of ways I could write a whole post just listing the differences.

While critical of my drawing, however, I didn’t have anywhere near that same rage I have when I see (a lot of) other artworks. You know, the kind where you want to scream “This is art” and kick the artist in the stomach, sending him flying backward into a deep pit, Sparta style.

I just saw that there was a lot of room for improvement.

And also that doing all this on better paper might help.

Oh, and that reading a few articles on how to draw might help.

You can guess what I did next.

In any case, I’ll be posting the results of what happened soon.

Update: 

There are four posts on this same topic now. If you're interested in reading them all, check out the following links.

1. How I Started Drawing Again
2. How That Drawing Thing is Going
3. I'm Starting to Like the Smell of Graphite in the Morning
4. 50 Shades of Graphite