I am teaching myself to draw with graphite pencils and it is one of the most challenging skills I’ve attempted to learn in quite some time. I’d always thought that drawing was more of a talent than a skill, but I am finding that it is something you can learn if you’re willing to commit the time and practice required to develop the necessary skills. I am starting from ground zero, so this skill is going to take perseverance to develop, but I’m ok with that. I’m already getting a lot of pleasure from the process.
I have many friends who are professional artists and one planted the seed when she let me borrow a book called “Botanical Art Techniques,” which in hindsight is too advanced for a beginner but is still quite inspirational and something I hope to work up to. To learn the basics, I enrolled in an online course for drawing at a website called the Virtual Instructor, which is very good, but I’m also augmenting that instruction with free youtube videos, which are also a goldmine of free instructional content, demonstrations, and exercises to develop core skills.
Learning to draw has already changed the way I perceive the outdoors and helped me slow down, savor, and focus on the experience. Much like writing, it requires careful observation but in a very different way than when I’m writing about my internal feelings of awe in a landscape. My perception is much more focused on form, light, depth, and color, particularly in the rocks, boulders, and tree bark that I want to draw. I’ll eventually work my way up to draw botanical subjects and use color, but for the moment I’m content with simpler forms, black and white, and shades of grey.
The approach I’m taking is to focus on very basic skills, such as drawing simple objects, shading to create depth and shadows, depicting accurate proportions, and pencil control rather than trying to draw representational objects or scenes. These are the fundamental building blocks of drawing and it’s important to develop these skills to draw efficiently and tackle more complex subjects. The process reminds me of when I taught myself how to learn mathematics and statistics in graduate school, by focusing on the basics and practicing, a lot, to build up a solid foundation of how to think in a different way. It’s a slow approach to skill acquisition, but it’s satisfying to notice my progress.
Do you draw or paint outdoor subjects? What was your learning process like?
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