Daily Drawing 63: Drawing Can Take You Anywhere
I've been thinking a lot about why I like to draw and why I really think everybody should draw.
We're always looking for an escape.
We're looking for ways to take away stress of everyday life. We're looking for quick fixes and I think drawing can sometimes feel like a daunting skill to learn because we judge ourselves too much.
But drawing can take you anywhere.
It can take you places that are only found in your imagination.
Yeah, you might not have the skills to make it look like a hyperrealistic image or even make it look like it's popping up out of the page, but I'm not sure that matters.
You have the ability to create worlds and remove stress by creating those worlds with something as simple as pencil and paper.
I grew up learning how to draw from a guy named Mark Kistler. He still surprisingly has been teaching on YouTube and he has his own website now with all of his drawing lessons, which is pretty cool. I loved learning from him and taking what was in my head and putting it on a piece of paper and doing that over and over and over again.
As kids, we don't have that same level of self-criticism most of the time. As we get older, we start to listen to people on the outside who look at our work and think that it looks like garbage and we internalize that and it becomes self-criticism.
Drawing, especially when you just have a sketchbook it doesn't have to be perfect. It doesn't have to look like a masterpiece. My drawing today definitely is not a masterpiece, but it's influenced from the work that I used to do as a kid, little pencil rocket ships that Mark Kistler would teach me to draw. It's bringing back really fond memories of a time when drawing was just fun and sent me to a new place (to be clear it’s still fun, I just have a lot more mental baggage to sift through in the process 😅).
I want that for every single person.
I want us to not go to the quick, fleeting dopamine hits.
I want us to embrace creativity and messiness and imperfection.
We're not talking about creating stuff that's sellable. I just think that we need to take money out of the equation sometimes and just do it for us. You can be an artist even if you don’t make a living off of it.
Make something that makes you smile, makes you laugh, makes you cry, make stuff that resonates with you.
And if if you don't succeed in creating the vision on that piece of paper that you had in your mind, do it again.
That's the part of building a creative practice that is the most important, is just continuing to do it and showing up.
And even if you don't ever post it and share it with the world, if it makes you happy, if it takes you to another place, then that's okay.
That's what it's for.
It's not always about sharing it.
But if you feel like sharing it, you definitely should, because it would encourage other people to also start a creative practice.
K. Thanks. Bye.
