About 10 or 12 years ago, I started work on a book that was meant to help beginning students to overcome common difficulties they were apt to encounter when learning to  draw.  For various reasons I never finished the book but, with a few updates, I do think the information could be of value.  In that spirit I plan to post excerpts from the book while emending and enhancing some of the ideas along the way, which will lead to slight disparities between posts.  This shouldn't interfere with understanding the  main concepts presented.  

The initial text was titled Drawing: A Quick Approach to Gaining Professional Level Skill.  As I continued teaching ,learning and ruminating on the drawing process, it occurred to me that a new way of ordering the information I was presenting might give fresh insight.  So, in that spirit (again), I retitled the book:  "Learning to Draw; Seeing and the Three Kinds of Memory".  This didn't require me to drastically change the information I was presenting, only to reorder it in what I think, is a more logical sequence.  By posting This material on the Blog I am hopping not only to offer new insights, but to illicit feedback about the overall concept and the usefulness of the ideas. 

I'll start by posting my initial Introduction and then add subsequent chapters, in the coming weeks.  I will be adding visual examples, many from my classes but some from other (I assume)  copywrite free sources.  

Introduction 

Why another book about drawing?  It’s a legitimate question, since there are already hundreds of worthy books on the subject. Yet, in my experience of 35 years as a professional artist and teacher, I have encountered too many talented, even gifted, drawers/sketchers/artists who have struggled on as draftsmen despite having read these books and having taken countless courses, seminars and workshops. There are some very good books out there, of course; I have read many of them myself and have even used some of their advice in my drawing classes over the years.  But, these books generally take many things about new students for granted.  They assume that the readers have already acquired basic ways of looking at the world around them, and that drawing is a straightforward matter of transferring what they see to paper.

 

What is missing from most of the books out there is an explanation of why the drawings you make don’t look like the author’s examples.  Some books do give advice on how to overcome common problems that are encountered, but the advice merely suggests approaches but doesn’t explain why doing these things is essential.  They give advice that is either incomplete or so expansive as to lose focus on the main issues.

 

I wrote this book to help demystify and explain the initial stages of the drawing process so your drawings will look like the examples.  Comprehending the artist’s approach to seeing and organizing space is crucial to making rapid progress as a draftsman. Once the drawing student has mastered the basic seeing skills, other areas like learning style and development of hand skills, will improve rapidly. As the student becomes convinced that he (or she) is on the right track, he will become doubly committed to mastering technique and will then begin to advance even more quickly.

 

Teaching students to see has become a primary goal of my teaching. The students I work with must prepare for careers in applied art fields by developing professional-level drawing skills within two short years, often while carrying a full course load. Although this book was inspired by my work with these students, the approaches and methods I explain here are applicable to anyone.

 

No book can teach you how to draw. Not even this one.  What this book can do, however, is give you a set of tips and instructions to follow (along with a little inspiration) so that you can teach yourself. The actual learning process, its progress, rapidity and extent depend upon your own will and commitment.  If you are among the fortunate few who were born with a pencil grafted to their arm, then no prompting by a book or instructor is needed. However, if you are like most of us, and you have some basic talent but know that you need to work on it, then a book like this one is a good next {first} step. 

 

The first four chapters of this manual deal with seeing, developing essential memories, improving eye/hand skills, and an approach to learning so that your speed of progress is maximized. This part of the book specifically describes the “seeing issue” and shows you a proven set of strategies to overcome the mental conflicts that cause so much frustration for students.  Once you’ve mastered the seeing correctly,  you will learn ways to speed up the acquisition of the other skills you’ll need. The last few chapters offer information to help you with specific drawing issues, like the rules of light and shading technique-- ideas to accelerate your progress toward developing a personal style. Many of the thoughts on style are my personal observations, and students are referred to other volumes, which I have listed in Appendix B, to further expand their knowledge of the subject.

 

So, this is a short book and one that I hope is the book you were looking for, the book that tells you straight what you need to know to teach yourself. It is the book I looked for in vain when I was struggling as a young artist, which is why I decided to write it.