Learning to Draw in 1,000 Words or Less
My dad taught me how to draw when I was seven years old. We sat on the floor of his bedroom, leaning against the bed, and I watched as he sketched a farmhouse scene, complete with a tractor and wooden fence. I looked at the rough lines and swooned. Those lines, made by sweeping a #2 pencil across a piece of notebook paper without any thought, were beautiful. Magical. A more polished drawing would have been worthless — it was the imperfection that I loved. I wanted more than anything to whip lines across my own paper and produce a coffee cup, a zebra, a monster, a rocket ship. I sketched for years after that, but my lines never looked right. Too curvy. Not curvy enough. Too straight. Not straight enough. I retraced practically every line I drew, hoping always to make it better. It never was. The second and third pass made every line worse. The roughness of my lines was never the right roughness.
Two years ago, I ordered a frameless, magnetic whiteboard from an office furniture store for $450. When it was delivered a couple of weeks later, my dad and I spent a full day figuring out how to attach the thin, 30-pound sheet of metal to the wall in my home office. We settled on nailing up plywood and gluing the whiteboard onto it. It’s six feet tall and five feet wide, and is bordered by the edges of the plywood.
I also bought a classic and much-revered book about drawing. I bought or created every tool the book said to use and more. A glass frame with grid lines drawn on it in black permanent marker. A large sketchbook. Two small sketchbooks. A pair of pocket Moleskine sketchbooks. Art pencils in several shades. Gum erasers. I was determined to become a _visual thinker_ — one who expresses every concept or idea with sketches and doodles. I imagined the sketches I’d create and how I’d take pictures of them with my camera phone and email them to my clients to illustrate the brilliant ideas that would pop into my head every ten minutes through the will of my own momentum. I imagined awing conference crowds by drawing off-the-cuff illustrations during presentations, scrapping slide decks in favor of a flip pad and a set of Sharpies.
I worked through the exercises in the first and second chapters. The book promised to teach me how to, quite literally, see the world differently so that I could, at long last, transcribe images onto paper. Just a few days in, I drew a line-art sketch of an old man, and I was astonished. The book was right. It was the first sketch drawn by my own hand that I’d ever considered beautiful. For the next couple of weeks, I kept the book on my bedside table. Almost every night, I looked at the sketch of the old man and wondered if I’d ever again achieve that level of perfection. Every few nights, I picked up the drawing book and flipped through the next couple of chapters to see what came next. After a few weeks, I moved it and my sketchbook to the bookshelf, and promised myself to come back to it when I had more time. A month later, I flipped through the drawing book again.
It’s still there on the bookshelf. Next to the frame with the lines drawn on it. Next to the large sketchbook.
A couple of months ago, I flipped through the last Moleskine notebook I used. It was filled with words. Handwritten words, in black ink. On my whiteboard was a collection of sticky notes, grouped under labels I’d written with a black dry erase marker. The yellow pieces of paper were covered with notes I’d written in black ink.
On the six-foot-by-five-foot whiteboard I bought for $450 and glued onto the plywood I nailed into the wall with my dad, I had written words. In my fantasy, I was a visual thinker. In my reality, a writer.
On my whiteboard at this very moment is what could be considered a sketch. It’s a circle with a line running through it from upper-right to lower-left, the classic icon used to indicate something bad. Something you shouldn’t do. Something you shouldn’t use.
Inside the circle is the word “Adverbs.”
