Permission to draw badly

Note: If you have issues with the (very wonkily drawn) naked form, you will want to skip this newsletter.

I draw for a living, which means that the drawings I make have to be good. Good is subjective, of course, but since I make children’s books, my drawings have to be in line with what a publisher wants to see and what readers (and parents, who buy books) respond to. So I work very hard to make good drawings.

But making good drawings is a lot of pressure and sometimes I just want to make lines for the sake of making lines and not think about whether the outcome would be considered good or bad.

Enter life drawing.

Life drawing, drawing from a live model, either in person or on zoom, is where I give myself permission to draw badly. Actually, I don’t even have to give myself permission to draw badly, I just do. It’s really hard to make an amazing drawing when you only have a minute or three to draw your subject.

And that, for me, is the beauty of life drawing. There is a format. You cede control over what you are doing to someone else who tells you what to draw and how long you will take to draw it. Typically, you warm up with 1 minute drawings, then move on to 3 or 5 minute drawings before progressing to longer and longer drawings.

These early drawings are my favorites. Sometimes they look barely human. Most of the time it doesn’t even look like I am drawing the same person. Limbs are too long, proportions are insanely wrong. But their is something freeing and exciting about the wonkiness. I draw on top of my drawings. I draw the same thing over again. I mess up, but I keep going.

It’s drawing as meditation, instead of drawing for the end result. It’s hard to concentrate on making something beautiful when your model is moving every few seconds as you do a “moving pose”. So instead you just draw. You put lines down on the page and they become something new. And there is something interesting about the juxtaposition of these drawings over the top of drawings over the top of drawings.

It’s fun and hilarious and embarrassing. I am not good at life drawing, not in the classical sense, but I enjoy it. And I find MY way to draw the figure, which is not the fussy focus on proportions that classical artists use. I feel my way through it, embracing all the wonkiness because that is how I enjoy drawing. I don’t enjoy measuring and drawing painstaking lines. And that’s ok because life drawing is for all kinds of artists making all kinds of art.

Those who agonize over a line in pencil and those who draw in pen without thinking too much about it and everyone in between. And I think there is beauty in the variety.

At the end of this session people were invited to share their drawings and the diversity of it all was fantastic. Everybody was drawing the same model but each with their own artist’s hand and eye. Every drawing different because the person drawing it is unique. There is so much magic in that.

These drawings are from a life drawing session I did this week with Sarah Dyer and the wonderful model Naomi Wood. It was my first life drawing session in over a year and I felt like a newborn calf trying to figure out how to use my limbs and it showed in my wonky drawings. But the point is in the doing and I can look at each of these images and remember the feeling of drawing the lines. Of being in community with others drawing the same form.

I used to attend an online life drawing session every week but got too busy and fell out of the habit, but the session I did this week reminded me how much I miss it, and how much I need this outlet of drawing just for the fun of it. So I will try to figure out how to work this habit back into my schedule.

My favorite online life drawing sessions are with Draw Brighton. They are a wonderful group of people who I started drawing with during the Pandemic.

Anyway, have a great week and I hope you take this as permission to draw something badly. It’s a lot of fun. See you next week!