On Learning, Growth, and Being Bad at Things

“The more you learn, the more remains to be explored… the joy has to be in the journey, because you will never feel you have arrived.”

—“Foundations of Calligraphy,” Sheila Waters

Recently, I’ve been working my way through Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain (DRSB) by Betty Edwards, and it’s been enlightening since I never really learned the fundamentals of drawing from life.

I remember working on some exercises in middle school with paint and markers, including one where we divided a reference image up into a grid and tried to copy it one cell at a time. That exercise did not work for me. The face we were supposed to copy ended up looking garbled and distorted, amateurish, and I think that was enough to kill my enthusiasm for learning art at the time.

During the pandemic, bad as it was, I was fortunate to have a lot of extra time to learn new skills. As part of my preparatory studies before attending Maryland Institute College of Art's Graphic Design M.A. program in Baltimore, I took an online drawing class from artist Brent Eviston. Though I respect Eviston's skill as a teacher, and his class got me started on the drawing journey, it still didn’t quite land. I learned a lot of individual skills but couldn’t get my drawings to gel the way I wanted them to.

A perspective drawing exercise I found in my phone but don't remember making.

It ended up not being a problem, though. In my experience, most designers aren’t often asked to draw unless they make illustration an intentional part of their personal style.

In my work as a brand and communication designer, I find it more important to have a command of typography, layout, balance, hierarchy, theory, technology, user experience, and other nuts-and-bolts design skills than it is to draw.

That said, fundamental basic drawing skills are still a great asset to any and all visual arts careers, and I do draw as part of my job, just in a different way from what you’d learn in an introductory art class. I typically use simplified forms and focus on fast execution of concepts over well-rendered sketches. This is partially just my style and partially because I’m much faster working something up in Illustrator than drawing it with pen and pencil (except when it comes to drawing letterforms, which is a different story). There’s room for me to grow my practice through drawing non-letterform based images, though, and I’ve been interested for a while in spending more time improving my skills.

Hence, on a recommendation from illustrator Tom Froese’s YouTube channel, I bought DRSB. As often happens with these things, I left it on my bookshelf for over a year, intending to start it but never actually doing it.

The very first exercise freaked me out. You’re supposed to draw a portrait of yourself and then one of someone you know from memory. The second one would be challenging even for a seasoned portrait artist, but that’s the point. I finally did it, and it made my skin crawl to spend so much time on something I was genuinely terrible at. The book goes into more detail, but although it’s an uncomfortable exercise, it’s also a valuable one. The exercises get less intimidating after that.

One thing that’s made a huge difference in my current drawing efforts is doing them with a friend! My friend Lydia proposed that we start a drawing club and work our way through the book together.

If you’re ever trying to learn a difficult skill, try to find someone to learn it with. It will make your lives so much easier, and it gives you a fun way to connect with someone on a different level.

Also, I find it fun and worthwhile to take otherwise rote exercises (like drawing your hand) and find creative ways to transmute them into something more original and meaningful. It’s a great way to get out of a creative block. For example, I remember when I first was learning graphic design, I worked my way through Josef Albers’ influential “Interaction of Color” book and made a lot of interesting work from translating those exercises to a digital medium.

Hands are generally considered to be fairly tough to draw. But the way Edwards teaches and explains the act of perception has been a game-changer. I was pretty happy with the initial hand drawing from the book, and I intuitively felt I could add some calligraphy to make it more unique and meaningful. I didn’t consciously intend for the finished piece to represent where I’m at in my life and how I feel about my creative practice, but there you have it. Intuitive artmaking reveals things that may otherwise be left under the surface.

Last week, I drew this chair, which to be honest, I’m not as happy with (I made some mistakes with the perspective).

But that said, it’s still worlds better than what I was drawing before starting the book, and it’s all because Edwards breaks down the process of drawing into small, understandable, and exceedingly well-explained points. We could all learn from this approach:

The more you break something down into small pieces, the less intimidating it becomes.

Another lesson: don't be afraid to keep learning and keep being bad at stuff. You never know what you’re capable of until you give it a fair shot. Take it from me: sometimes all you need is the right guide, the right circumstances, or the right time.

Sidebar: after finishing my M.A. in graphic design, I developed a passion for calligraphy, and I’ve gotten quite good at it. I can tell you confidently that calligraphy is a different skill than regular drawing. There’s some crossover, but not as much as you might think.

Also, you may be wondering, why learn to draw in the age of AI? Well, for that matter, why learn to play piano or guitar, why play chess, why learn to do anything that a computer can do? Drawing and other creative pursuits teach you a different way of seeing and listening, and a different way of thinking and problem-solving. They are valuable in their own right, regardless of advances in technology. And I still think AI can't hold a candle to a trained artist just yet because AI lacks judgment and taste. Maybe that will change, we'll see.