Understanding Drawing – A Guide From Beginner to Imagination

Understanding Drawing is the culmination of over 6 years of research, investigation, testing, practice, failing and learning. During this time I’ve taken hundreds of courses, gone through hundreds of tutorials and demos from different artists, read a multitude of books, trying to piece together what it is that I need to do in order to improve my art. I’m self-taught, I’d never taken art classes before, didn’t draw as a kid and started at 25 with 0 previous experience and no idea what I’m getting myself into. Sometimes I got it right – very often though – I got it wrong.

Regardless of whether you’re studying with an experienced artist, or learning by yourself – you’re always in charge of your development. It’s your responsibility to piece together a big picture view of art and to try to figure out the next steps for your work. At the very beginning – this can be a very daunting task. Art can be massively complicated, with so many skills being tangled together. There is overlap between different fields, language that is imprecise – words are used to mean several very different things to different artists. Things can get very confusing very quickly.

My goal with this course is to provide you with context. To go through what’s important and what is not. As beginners it’s very easy to mistake a convention or a style as something we need to be doing, only to realize later on we never developed the thinking and the skills required to produce our own work.

Drawing is an incredibly important skill to develop. It’s essential for visual communication. And with practice and internalization of skills, it becomes very powerful and so much faster. We begin to be able to think through drawing, in order to create what we imagine, rather than being constrained to technical issues. But this development of skill has to be deliberate. We have to be able to see the big picture, in order to know what we need to do next to progress.

We’ll start from the very beginning – we’ll talk about what the purpose of drawing is. We’ll examine visual language. We’ll talk about structure and how we often mistake the end result we see for the work that went in to produce the image. We’ll talk about cause and effect. How to begin training our ability to think dimensionally and spatially. How to start creating objects. We’ll deconstruct drawing down to separate Levels, tied to distinct Skills that we need to train in order to go from absolute beginner – from symbolic drawing, to realistic or stylized imagination work. These Levels and Skills are also coupled with Knowledge – we absolutely need to acquire certain theory and drill it to a very high level, in order to internalize it and be able to act on it, without having to think about it.