You have been “drawing” for your entire life
You CAN draw because you always have been
Drawing is a natural ability for human beings. Drawing is easy.
Ha! You say.
“I can’t draw a stick figure. I can’t draw a straight line. I have no talent for drawing. What do you mean drawing is easy?”
Drawing IS easy. You have been drawing your entire life, well, maybe not when you were just a baby. And you’ve been drawing straight lines too, it’s just that you didn’t call it that.
What you’ve been drawing
Can you print words with pen or pencil on paper?
Can you write your signature?
Can you scribble notes to yourself?
Guess what — you ARE drawing.
Written words are drawings that represent sounds, things or concepts.
We’ve forgotten the simple fact that printing and cursive are drawings. Hieroglyphics, Cuneiform, Pictograms and Runes are drawings. Look at the visual representation of the world’s spoken languages as drawings, for they are. These words you are reading are drawings that have been digitized, yet they are still drawings. For someone who doesn’t read English these little symbols all smooshed together might as well be alphabet soup.
Can you “draw” the straight lines of an “M” an “N” or a “Z?”
They are short straight lines but they are straight lines. Have you ever written large letters on a chalkboard or whiteboard?
So what happened?
When did you decide you weren’t drawing? I blame the schools and “educated” people.
At some point, in a lot of schools, drawing, as an artistic expression and playtime for little kids, is omitted from the classroom curriculum to pursue “education” in the form of printing letters and numbers and forming words. No one ever told you you were simply “drawing” sounds. Wouldn’t it have been nice if they had? But then, I think it would be nice for drawing as artistic expression to ALWAYS be included in all school’s curriculum for a lot of good reasons, especially education (which I love BTW). (But that’s fodder for another article.)
So what do I have to do to get you to stop saying you can’t draw?
This seems to have become my personal quest — to help people stop saying “I can’t draw” to “I can draw.” This doesn’t mean I expect everyone to want to draw as an artistic life pursuit. But what if . . .
If you would make this mental and belief shift,
if you would give yourself permission,
if you would just move a pen or pencil on paper, doodle, play with letters and numbers as drawings,
if you would allow yourself to pay attention to how your hand and fingers move,
If you would simply do this,
you would know,
you would know that you CAN draw.
Next time I’ll tell you what the word “draw” REALLY means.
Baby Steps to Drawing Success is a series I have, and am adding to, on Youtube. The first 5 in the series are about shifting your beliefs and taking those very first “baby-steps” to drawing things other than letters and numbers. Check it out HERE.
