Category: Art

Imagine this: you’re a mere lad approaching his mid-40s with truly frightening velocity, and you’ve been handed a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to start a business. An investment, even.

And instead of doing something sensible, like getting into real estate or opening a local lawn-mowing franchise, you are making an art product.

This is a problem because if you’ve been online lately and your algorithms have noted your casual interest in learning art, you cannot scroll more than ten centimetres without being targeted by ads for one of several million existing art instruction courses. It turns out that there are a lot of very skilled artists out there who, in a line stretching back through Bob Ross and Bill Alexander all the way back to the Middle Ages, want to teach people how to do art like them. And now, thanks to the internet, they’re all hawking their own online course.

An art startup seems a bit silly now, doesn’t it? So why are you doing this?

(It’s possible you’re not doing this, that it’s only me who has this very specific set of circumstances, so I’ll just drop the “you” for now.)

I have so many reasons.

I’ve been dreading typing this all up, to be honest, because… it’s a lot. You know how some folks will info-dump on you about their new interest? If you have ever been in audible distance of a middle-aged man who has discovered barbecues you know exactly what I am talking about. Well, this is a 25-year obsession trying to escape my brain all at once.

Also I already wrote some of it.

The #1 thing most adults wish they could get better at

At the end of that post, I promised a part 2. That was several years ago. Better late than never! So let me get straight to the point:

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If you feel like you can’t draw, it’s because you were taught wrong.

Or, even more likely, you weren’t taught at all.

In my previous post, I wrote:

Without training, or a rare quirk of neuroatypicality, [drawing] is like trying to do calculus without ever having learned how to add 2 + 2.

So, if you’ve ever beaten yourself up for not knowing how to draw, you can stop. It’s a miracle anyone learns to draw at all.

But, also miraculously, it’s almost certain that you can still do it.

If you’re reading this, you can read. Well done! Reading is an enormously demanding cognitive skill. It takes years to learn and master. And if you understood my 2+2 metaphor, you can also add. Ka pai! Maths is hard, especially once you get past the intuitive stage (concepts like “less,” “more,” “a group of more than four things.”)

So if – an adult, I’m assuming – can do hard things like “read” and “add” but cannot draw, why is that?

In order to answer that, we have to go back.

I’m going to assume you drew as a child. Nearly all children do.¹ It is an almost universal behaviour, across different cultures and times. In fact, the ability to draw *recognisable* forms seems to be one of the things that is uniquely human, and children typically engage in it without having to be told, a bit like how they naturally pick up language.

So why do we stop? Why did you stop?

Let’s go back a little further first.

The drawing behaviours of children go through recognisable stages. They typically start by drawing scribbles. Around age 2, these may start to coalesce into simple faces – eyes, nose, mouth (usually smiling.) This is the stage my daughter is currently in and it’s adorable. Later, children begin to draw their world. Mum, dad, brothers, sisters. Houses. Doors. Windows. Trees. Pets.

Up until a particular age, children’s drawings are mostly two-dimensional symbols. You know what a child’s drawing of a house looks like; it’s the Playschool house, or (more recent reference) Peppa Pig. Children put spectacular effort into these drawings. They are often critical of their own efforts – I used to lose my mind when I coloured outside the lines. But, by and large, young children continue drawing. As you’ll know if you’ve ever tried to get a kid engrossed in a drawing to do anything else, it’s often hard to make them stop.

Until they suddenly do.

Around a certain age, typically from 9 to about 12 – often on the cusp of puberty, which I don’t think is a coincidence – children grow frustrated with their symbolic drawings. Motivated by either an innate desire or by cultural forces², they start wanting to draw realistically.

And they can’t. Not because they’re not capable of it. Because they’re not taught how to do it.

This – the near-universal aspirations of children to develop realistic drawing and painting – is met with the near-universal inability of parents and teachers to help the kids do what they want to do.

Because, more often than not, parents and teachers have no idea how to draw either.

When children can’t do the kind of drawing they want, and no amount of effort seems to help, they – very understandably – quit.

In effect, the desire to draw realistically forms a kind of developmental cliff-face; one that nearly every child falls off before they’re properly into their teens.

Imagine if we allowed this to happen with reading or writing or maths. Imagine if every child who wanted to do science was told that there was no way to help them progress past basic addition. “Hey, don’t worry, keep trying, and maybe you’ll pick up calculus!”

Learning to draw – which nearly all children want to do, and which is the bedrock of further art practice – is being left to privilege and luck.

I don’t think that’s fair. And I want to fix it.

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I’m not having a go at teachers (or parents) here. Sometimes kids get lucky: a mentor does know how to draw reasonably realistically, and they manage to pass this on to the child in a way that works for them. Or the child has the kind of neurodiversity that makes them spend days, weeks or years on one hyperfocus, pushing past obstacles, seeking out their own resources, eventually finding a method that works for them.

The latter is what we tend to call “talent.”

It’s not parents and teachers’ fault if they don’t know how to draw because they were never taught; it’s just the perpetuation of a systemic problem. I maintain that if more people knew how to draw in even a moderately realistic way, more kids would learn how.³

If you stopped drawing as a child, you may have some memory of why. A lot of the time it’s internalised as “I just realised I was no good,” or “My drawings sucked so I lost interest.” Or, much too often, it’s along the lines of “Someone told me my drawing was bad so I just stopped.”

If you feel this way, and have ever wished you could go back in time to learn to draw – well, you kind of can.

As I wrote before, most adults who currently consider themselves incapable of drawing because of this nearly universal low-key childhood trauma can still learn. And the purpose of my startup business is not to serve the over-saturated “courses for adults who already have some art skill” market. The goal is to teach drawing to adults who wish they’d learned how to draw as kids – and to give kids the instruction they need before they fall over the realistic-drawing developmental cliff-face.

How to do that? By not just teaching the basics of drawing, but to make it possible for parents (and teachers!) to teach the children in their lives how to draw as well.

That’s the plan. I could go on, and on. I really could. But I need to stop just talking about this stuff and actually make the product. For that I need guinea pigs. The kind with opposable thumbs and a desire to draw things.

Could that be you?

If it is, either reply to this post, or head to this hilariously basic website and put your email in the thing.

It’ll be free for the first cohort, which will probably max out at around 20 people.

Thanks, as always, for reading. I’d love to know what you think – your comments are absurdly welcome.

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1. Some do not, but this is quite rare, and usually relates to a developmental delay/disability or a neurodiversity like autism. That’s not to say that autistic people cannot draw; many can, and in fact a lot of what is thought of as “natural” drawing talent is probably just a form of neurodiversity that manifests as a special interest in making art. There is also a thing called “dysgraphia” which probably deserves its own post; it definitely exists, but because of the reasons outlined in this post I believe a lot of people who think they have dysgraphia have actually just been taught badly or not at all. ↩︎
2. I don’t know which. I suspect it’s both. ↩︎
3. I’m being a bit loose with the word “realistic.” Children don’t typically aspire to photorealism; I have wowed classes by drawing a very rough “realistic” eye on a whiteboard. ↩︎