How to Use Drawings to Boost Your Imagination

Learning how to draw Rakugaki, a Japanese drawing style

Four years ago, I started the Learning Lab challenge 🚀, basically every 1 or 2 months I learn about a new topic and build something related to this topic. I don’t have a strict criteria to choose a topic, it depends on how I feel, the skills I want to develop, the new innovations to explore, or it can be just about my level of curiosity. As a developer and designer, I wanted to deepen my design skills. I thought that learning how to draw could help with that 🤔.

A few years ago, I went to a design fair in Paris and I found on a booth a book called “Become a Rakugaki expert: Develop your imagination through drawing”.

Cover of the book — Source: https://editions-b42.com/produit/devenir-un-expert-du-rakugaki/

I opened it to check inside and it just looked amazing 🤯. It was a book about using this Japanese drawing style called Rakugaki§. I wrote the name down and I said to myself, one day I will buy this book and learn Rakugaki.

Here we are now, on the path to learn Rakugaki, my 15th learning of the Learning Lab challenge.

Learning preparation

This learning preparation follows the Learning Lab methodology.

1. Finding a mentor
   I didn’t really look for a mentor this time 😬, I felt a bit like the Rakugaki book was my mentor.
2. Defining the scope of the topic
   The scope was pretty simple. Learn everything from the book and be able to draw anything with this Japanese style!
3. Choosing a learning resource
   It’s pretty obvious this time, I used the book Become Expert of Rakugaki — Bunpei Yorifuji, unfortunately, it seems that it’s only in French, Spanish or Japanese.
4. Defining a project
   My initial project was to write an illustrated book about mental models. But because it will take time 🙈, I reduced it to a sample of this book (and I will release the book later).

Boost your imagination with Rakugakis

What is Rakugaki