First Steps: Two Resources That Got Me Started in Drawing
A few months after giving birth to my first child, I cultivated my original art-related practice: always having paper and pencil on me. At the time, this did not feel like a legitimate “practice” — real artists make interesting things every time they pick up their tools, right? I often felt like I was failing because I would bring the supplies out of my bag while outside, or in class, or at my desk, only to find myself at a loss for a worthy subject or, more often, without the courage to attempt a depiction of what I was seeing.
I wanted to draw everything, but I didn’t want to draw anything poorly, so I often didn’t draw at all, or I drew very tentatively, afraid to mess up.
Now that I do have a drawing practice that I love — one that isn’t fear-based — I can see that even forming the habits of always being ready to draw and always thinking about how to depict what surrounded me — even if I didn’t put anything on paper in that moment — served me as I stumbled my way through the infant period with my first child.
It was more difficult to focus on the likelihood of my own shattering or agonize about my child’s mortality when I was obsessing about pencils or thinking about how an artist had managed to clearly differentiate between their foreground and background, using color or line or scale.
Still, I did want to learn to draw well, so rather than continue to stare at my sadly empty sketchbook, or draw little bits of life without any real intention, I bought Claire Watson Garcia’s Drawing for the Absolute and Utter Beginner (one of the books I’d perused earlier through my library), picked up the supplies recommended in its first pages, and got started.
Watson Garcia takes her students from assignments based on simple wire shapes, to upside-down drawings and exercises in contour practice. The work detailed in the book grew progressively more challenging, and soon I found myself drawing my spouse’s side profile (pretty well) and practicing the angles of indoor spaces.
Around this time, I also started taking a bunch of London Drawing Group’s classes, which are wonderfully accessible, taught by a group made up mostly of women, offered online, and pay-what-you-can. It was through LDG that I found some of my favorite teachers — Jo Blaker, Josh Armitage, Luisa-Maria MacCormack, and Frances Stanfield — and through them that I’ve been exposed to so many artists, and ideas about art.
I often still felt my own tentativeness when I sat down to draw, even with all this practice. But by going back to this pursuit again and again, despite my discomfort and lack of confidence, I was showing myself so much. I could learn a whole set of new skills, despite being in my thirties. I could do something just because I wanted to. I could free myself through habit.
This was the most important insight — and applicable to postpartum healing and parenting, too. By showing my child that I was capable of self-discovery, I hope I was showing them that change and exploration were ways of coping with what might feel unresolvable in life.
I didn’t have to come to the page perfectly, or know what I was doing in every case. I just had to keep coming back — showing I cared about my pursuit by the time I took and the emotion I was willing to convey — and continuing to try to learn.
Have you undergone similar changes? What have you worked hard - through discomfort and fear - to learn?