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Why most of us still draw like ten-year-olds

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In my experience, almost everyone who doesn't draw for a living stays stuck in symbols, even with practice. Ask them to draw a person and you get a circle for the head, almonds for eyes, sticks for the body. And the older we get, the harder those signs seem to set.

I sometimes wonder too. If I had practiced properly when I was younger, would I be drawing what I want to by now, without effort?

But the more I looked into it, the less it seemed like something age had locked in. It looked more like something that happens because most of us stopped in the same place.

The wall at about ten

Children's drawings tend to grow in much the same order. First they scribble, then they draw in signs: a circle with a few lines attached becomes a person. At this stage children are quite happy with their drawings.

Then, at around ten, they start wanting to draw things as they really look. Art educators often call this the crisis of realism. Their eyes have grown more demanding, and their hands can't keep up. Drawing stops being play and starts being judged as a result, and children are the first to notice that their drawings look awkward.

Many of them conclude, right then: I can't draw. And they stop.

So most adults draw at the age they stopped. A person drawn by someone of thirty or forty looks much like one drawn by a ten-year-old. It isn't that the ability set hard. The practice simply ended there.

I was one of those who didn't stop at that wall. I kept pushing against it for more than ten years. I still didn't get over it, and in the end I was worn out and stopped drawing. I know how high that wall is. That is why I wanted to find a way over it.

If many people got over it

Suppose the exercises in Right Drawing really work, and many people become able to draw what they want to. What would change? This is still imagination, but let me start with what has evidence behind it.

A trained eye goes to work

At Yale School of Medicine, medical students take a class in looking closely at paintings in an art museum. In a study published in 2001, students who took the class got nearly 10% better at spotting the features that matter for diagnosis in photographs of patients. Many medical schools now offer similar classes.

Practicing drawing is, in the end, practicing seeing what is there rather than what you know. That eye would serve anyone whose work depends on seeing things as they are: doctors, and also scientists, mechanics and designers.

Drawing becomes another language

There was a time when reading and writing belonged to a few. Once everyone could write, the way we keep and share ideas changed.

I think drawing could be similar. Today, when we want to describe a picture in our head, we struggle with words. If we could just sketch it, meetings, classes and conversations with our children would change. History has plenty of people, like Leonardo da Vinci in his notebooks, who pushed their thinking forward by drawing.

We remember better

In a study at the University of Waterloo in Canada, people who drew a word remembered it far better than people who wrote it out several times, in some cases more than twice as well. The effect showed up regardless of drawing skill. With more people unafraid of drawing, more people would use it.

"I can't draw" goes away

Many people carry that label from about the age of ten for the rest of their lives. A door to expressing themselves closed then. If it opened again, that alone would be a real change.

When AI draws for us

Today anyone can get a convincing picture from a single sentence. Do we still need to practice drawing ourselves?

I think we need it more. AI can hand you a picture, but it doesn't train your eye. The value of drawing is moving from making a result to seeing and thinking. That is also why Right Drawing cares more about the process of looking than about a well-drawn result.

Starting again from ten

People used to say that drawing develops your right brain. Strictly speaking, you can't grow one side of the brain on its own. But what the saying pointed at is real, the ability to work with what you see and what you want to draw instead of the signs you know, and it can be trained.

I hope many people can start again from where they stopped at ten. You don't have to draw well. Start with a few minutes of looking.

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