Learning to Draw

I didn’t always know how to draw. Here’s a drawing I made in first grade:

1981 saw me playing with oil pastels and ethnic stereotypes. This wasn’t my finest hour, but it was probably the very best I could do with objectively trying to draw a human figure. I needed some practice.

I needed my 10,000 hours.

Fortunately for me, I had a very supportive network. My parents had always encouraged me to draw and create, and for that I am going to be grateful to them for the rest of my life. Even beyond that, I had some incredibly supportive and encouraging art teachers all throughout school, somehow keeping me motivated to learn this craft.

I wanted to be able to draw something by looking at nature and copying that thing exactly, especially the human form. Later, a secondary goal developed: I wanted to be able to draw things without looking at anything at all.

I fell into a tried and true routine artists have used for millennia: copying other works of art.

This may have been a couple of years after the first grade drawing, and I’m not sure if this was from an existing drawing or from TV. If you want to find out why Lou Ferrigno signed my childhood art, you can read all about that here:

Naturally, comic books were ideal for what I wanted: lots of human forms, stylized in a way that was fun to study, and with characters I knew and loved. By the time 9th grade arrived, I was practicing copying drawings of humans every day, like these:

I still had a long way to go, but I found that I could master this skill with enough focus and practice, even with an ink pen:

Incidentally, “master” is a loaded term and very much a spectrum, but I got what I was after here: this drawing looked awesome!

Meanwhile, I started making up my own superhero characters and drawing them straight from my head. This was much tougher work, nothing like copying another artist, but I found that I had a lot of tools in my art box to use. I could employ Todd McFarlane stylistic shading and detail in my own works, while borrowing Bernie Wrightson’s macabre realism or John Byrne’s classic postures.

This process improved over time, too, but I never felt quite like I mastered the ability to draw spontaneously out of my head. It just wasn’t anywhere near as good as some of those professional artists I loved to study. Then again, I was still just 16 or 17 years old.

The drawings from my head weren’t limited to superheroes, but the thing I did best was faces. I loved coming up with different weird looking faces.

Meanwhile, I kept drawing things I saw, like my hand. I got pretty far before college with the excellent teachers I had, especially Jackie Chalfant. I had the chance to tell Ms. Chalfant how much of a positive impact she had on me just a few years ago.

Still, I needed college art classes—and nude figure studies—before I could really get to where I thought I should be. I really loved creating this one when I was perhaps 20:

I was pretty sure I wanted to do something having to do with art for a living, but I’ve created very few drawings over the ensuing decades. I did fall in love with painting, and I learned how to do lithographic and screen printing, and then my intense creative energy started traveling to music and writing.

Then, I fell in love with jiu jitsu, and made something of a life out of that passion. I found that my artistic energy could be channeled quite naturally into creating new jiu jitsu techniques, or even copying the techniques of others (both proved to be plenty challenging!).

And, today, my passion flows into writing every day. Thank you for sharing this journey with me!

Have you ever spent decades learning how to do something? What are you most passionate about today?