Last year’s holiday on the Norfolk Broads.
Sometimes you just have to draw.
There is nothing scarier than a big blank piece of paper. We sit in front of it waiting for judgement. I recently came across this website http://drawanyway.com that I thought was a wonderful exponent of the view that I have always held: anyone can draw.
“Oh but I can’t, I was no good as a child and after the accident with red crayon on the wall I was never allowed near unlined paper again!”
Sorry, heard it, many, many times and I hate the idea that the natural impulse you and others like you had as children; to pick up the nearest smudgy thing and smudge it over something else, got squished. For the life of me, I cannot understand why we demand that everyone learns how to write to a reasonable degree of competency, but we don’t use this standard where drawing is concerned. Apparently you are only supposed to draw if you are a child prodigy in the subject. It seems the lesson we learn in the west is that you should only pick up your pencils with a sense of purpose if you have at least a 50% chance of being a Leonardo.
Where writing is concerned, we accept that most of us will write enough to get through life and work, and that some of us will excel. There needs to be a paradigm shift in how we approach drawing and its place in our education and our lives. We need to approach it in a similar way to the way we teach writing.
I came across Drawing for the Artistically Undiscovered, from which the title of this piece is taken, and gave it as presents to my whole family one Christmas (some draw, some don’t, no insult intended) and after I gave a few more to friends, I finally got one for myself. It teaches you how to smudge with impunity and if you have ever wanted to have a go at being the next Quentin Blake, this is the book for you. Liberating and fun, you can do bits of it in the loo if the crossword is being too taxing, and don’t worry about finding a pen because it comes with one and two pencils: black and red and they are both watercolour so that you can use a bit of spit to do fantastic cloud shapes.
If you really want to challenge your preconceptions about how rubbish you are, you might like to try Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, by Betty Edwards. The one exercise I can remember is where she got a load of teenagers to copy a picture of a seated gentleman and then turned the original upside down and got them to try it again. The second attempts were much more accurate and the point is made, yet again, about drawing what you see, not what you think you see.
When I worked at Target Direct, I never drew, my creative partner, the art director did all the drawing. Then I became a consultant the first time round and suddenly I had to explain my ideas and concepts by myself. I have yet to meet another copywriter who does scamps of their concept work, which I think is a great shame because being able to explain ideas in both words and pictures makes it easier for the client to understand what you’re about without scaring them. Showing up with a gorgeous Mac-ed up version that may well have got the logo a little bit wrong could make them think that you have already spent half the budget, that they are too late to take part in the creative process, or they will be so hung up on the incorrect logo, they will miss the impact of the concept.
Sometimes you just have to draw. And you don’t have to be a Leonardo; you just have to be yourself.