The #1 Secret to Drawing

Who doesn't want to be able to draw and do it well? The problem is that most people believe they can't draw even though they'd love to be able to do it well. The good news is that drawing is a skill that anyone can learn and develop, and just like any other skill, drawing requires a bit of knowledge and practice. Now the practice is up to you, but in this video I'm going to give you one major piece of knowledge that may dramatically affect your drawing ability. Hello there everyone, Matt here with the virtualinstructor.com, and in this video I'm going to share with you what I believe to be the number one secret to drawing. And once you accept this secret and apply it to your practice, your whole perspective on drawing might dramatically change. Many people believe that drawing is about making marks, and yes this is true. You must make marks to make a drawing, but there's a lot more to it than just making marks. Our drawings are the results of making marks on a surface, but the true essence to drawing is about what happens up here between your ears. Michelangelo is quoted as saying, a man or woman paints with his brains not with his hands. So what the heck does that mean? It means that our brains are actually more involved in the drawing process than our hands. And what part of our brains are most involved? Well, let's see if we can figure this out. To do so, we'll do a few drawing exercises, and to get the full effect, feel free to pause the video before going on to the next drawing exercise. Now you'll need a piece of paper and a pencil. For our first drawing exercise, I'd like you to draw a hammer. You know, a hammer that you would use to nail in some nails. Just a plain old hammer from your imagination. Don't look at anything to create this first drawing. Now's a good time to pause the video to make your drawing. Go ahead, I'll wait. Okay, now that you've made your drawing, I'll make my drawing of a hammer using just lines from my imagination. In my mind, hammer has a metallic end that's used to drive the nails, and then of course, a wooden handle. Now here's a look at my hammer drawn purely from imagination with zero percent observation. Okay, now keep this drawing handy, but put it to the side for now. Next, we're going to create another drawing, but this time we're going to have a few restrictions. This time, we'll actually look at a hammer. Now I'll be using a photo reference and it'll be on the screen for you, but if you want to use the same photo reference, I'll leave a link in the description below and it'll take you to a page where you can access the photo reference for yourself. Now for this drawing, we'll look at the photo reference, but you cannot look at your drawing paper. Yes, you heard that right. You cannot look at your drawing paper. We'll only be looking at the reference photo and not the drawing, but wait, there's more. We'll create this drawing using just one line. This means that once we place the pencil to the drawing surface, we can't pick it up again. The goal here is to pick a place to start observing on the hammer and try to move your hand with your pencil at the same speed and angle in which your eyes move over the reference. This is called a blind contour line drawing. Don't worry about what your drawing will look like. Just concentrate on observing and moving your hand with the pencil. Now's a good time to pause the video to make your drawing. Go ahead. I'll wait. Okay, now it's my turn to create the drawing. Try not to laugh. Now I'll start here on the end of my hammer and I'm not looking at the drawing paper. I've already positioned my pencil on the drawing paper and I'm trying to move my eye at the same speed that I'm moving my pencil over the surface. Remember, I'm not looking at the drawing paper. I'm just moving my eyes at the same speed that I'm moving my pencil over the paper. Now, of course, you're watching this and you're seeing my drawing develop. And although some of the lines look a little bit like a hammer, it doesn't look very controlled. In fact, it kind of looks like I'm So what we have now is two drawings. One from our imagination without any observation, and one that was created purely with a hundred percent observation. Drawing accurately is somewhere in between these two drawings. And now here's the big secret. Drawing is at least Drawing is about seeing and recording what we see in the form of marks. Think about it. We can't take a photo of something without pointing a camera at it. You can't draw something accurately without looking at it. Now let's create one final drawing and we'll use the same reference photo. But this time we can look at the reference photo and we can look at our drawing paper. And yes, we can pick up our pencil this time too. This time we're going to concentrate on moving back and forth with our eyes from the reference photo to the drawing paper, continually making comparisons to what we see in the reference and what we see on the paper. So we're going to be spending about half of our time looking and the other half of our time making marks. Now's a good time to pause the video to make your drawing. Go ahead. I'll wait. All right. And now I'll create my drawing using 50% observation. Okay. Now we've got some freedom. We can look at our reference and we can look at the drawing paper. And of course we can pick up our pencil now too. So now we're making comparisons between what we see in the reference and the marks that we're making on the drawing paper. In fact, it's a continuous process of going back and forth with our eyes between the photo reference and the drawing paper. All the answers are sitting there waiting for us in the photo reference. All we have to do is see them and place them in the correct location on the drawing paper. And this is the essence of drawing. It is all about observation. As you can see here, the drawing of a hammer that I'm creating, it looks a lot more like a hammer than our blind contour line drawing. Then of course, once I've got my basic lines in place, I can go back with a darker bolder line, of course, establishing the actual contour line drawing of the hammer. And now that's a much more accurate drawing. So there you have it. The number one secret to drawing is that drawing is at least 50% observation. It's about what happens between your ears a bit more than just making marks on the surface. And when you're practicing your drawing, you should also be practicing your observation skills because drawing ultimately is about observation. Thanks so much for watching this video. I hope you enjoyed it. I hope you were able to pick up a couple of things here and there. If you're new to the channel, please be sure to subscribe and click the notification bell so you're notified when we post new videos like this one. If you want to take your drawing and painting skills to another level, I suggest you check out the membership program over at the virtualinstructor.com, which includes a variety of drawing and painting courses on a variety of drawing and painting media and subject matter. We also have weekly live lessons, which are all recorded and stored in our vault. Weekly critiques as part of the member's minute and a year long curriculum for visual arts teachers. If you want to learn more about our program and start your free trial today, I'll leave a link in the description below. Thanks again for watching this video. And as always, I wish you all the very best in your artistic success.