I have been drawing for much of my life in different ways, with more focus and less at different times; however, I haven’t spent a ton of time really trying to “improve” my drawing as a skill – to learn the craft/principles, do deliberate practice, etc. I’ve decided today that I would like to make a commitment to do this for a while.

After looking around a bit, I found a set of courses by Brett Eviston that seem appealing to me starting with this on on “Basic Skills”. My first commmitment will be to work through each day of this course and document it here.

In my other sorts of learning I find documentation on this site to be really helpful. Documentation is a chance to reflect and analyze and be curious. I want to try approaching drawing with that sense of curiosity, tinkering, and so on.

I want to both follow the lessons and also retain a sense of play and experimentation. I was remembering back to when I first learned programming in school. Of course, there’s a clear sense of “correct” and “incorrect” in programming – the code can compile or not, have a syntax error or not, do the thing you want, or not.

And yet, I also remember the fun of each new chapter of learning as unlocking a new tool to play with. Now we will learn about the “for” loop – think of all the things you can do with that. Now we will learn about classes and object-oriented programming. Think of all the new things that can unlock.

A final thought for today is that, as a tech and society researcher, it’s unavoidable that it’s an interesting moment in time to focus on developing a “craft” like drawing (or even the same in terms of programming), what with the growth of generative AI tools that offer to abstract away all the “craft” and tinkering involved in doing and making things. All that matters now is “taste”, we’re told.

Practicing drawing is perhaps a chance to reflect on what’s lost or missing in that story. What is important about putting pen to paper yourself, about taking the time to do something slowly, one stroke at a time?