Art, I can't draw.

I can't draw is a statement I have heard many, many times and if I had a penny for every time that has been said to me I would be more than a few thousand pounds better off for sure.

In response to this statement I usually say nothing but think plenty, I do not argue over this because who am I to do such a thing but we can all draw, I have seen people with no arms and almost no legs draw… And here is a statue of such a person.

I don’t really know what these people who say that they can't draw actually mean but everybody can draw, some drawings may be considered better than others are but everybody can draw. If you can make marks you can draw, most drawings are broadly considered to be a form of expressive art and all art is subjective, meaning it is an individual choice like beauty.

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, have you ever heard that said before? Well it’s the same for drawings, one person’s drawing is another persons scribble so to say.

Drawing is not an end it is a means, a means of capturing or creating an image quickly using co-ordination between your choice of tool and your eyes. Not all drawings are created with a pencil in fact any tool that can be used to make a mark can also be used to draw. Even the action of drawing it’s self is considered to be a tool. A process for developing visual skills, co-ordination and creative imagination, it is again not generally considered to be an end in it’s self in fact many believe that it is the process that is the outcome not the end result or drawing.

Perhaps people just think they can’t draw because they never really tried? Perhaps they expect too much of themselves so quickly become self-defeatist and judgmental of there own abilities when they never really tried?

I don’t know these answers but I do know it was very hard for me because I had to teach myself to draw without a teacher or guide so I think perhaps that is why it is hard? Perhaps that's why people say they can’t draw because they don’t have a good encouraging teacher to help?

Other people where very eager to tell me when something didn’t look the way they expected it to look, they would say it’s wrong and seemingly took pleasure in doing so in the world I lived. So perhaps that’s another reason people say they can’t draw because people in the world around them tell them they can’t draw and not themselves, perhaps they are discouraged by other people’s careless comments?

My own son at nine years of age loved drawing and used to draw his own little wrestling figures that where really very imaginative, he would give them names spending hours doing this enjoying himself.

I asked my son if he would help me and listen to me for an hour a day while I showed him how to draw himself and he agreed, so we did this for a few days. He was quite soon able to draw a likeness of himself, capturing the defining elements that made his self-portraits recognizable to others. He worked mostly using a line drawing style with very little tonal modeling or shading, which is how I think most children translate information quite naturally.

I was very happy with his outcomes and it proved to me that even small children can draw very well when given the right information, encouragement and instruction. I am not saying that these drawings show any great artistic skill or merit but they do show an improvement in many ways. Even nine-year-old children can draw and so can you.