Why I made Right Drawing

Right Drawing is a place to practice, for beginners who want to draw well. It is not somewhere to post finished drawings. It is somewhere to do the practice that comes before them.

I have been practicing drawing for more than ten years. One problem stayed unsolved for most of that time, and this site began with it.

I could draw what I saw, but not what I imagined

Drawing what was in front of me got better the more I practiced. But when I tried to draw a person without looking at anything, a very different drawing came out. A circle for the head, almond shapes for the eyes, sticks for the arms. The signs my hand had known since childhood came out first.

These are called symbols. We don't remember things as they look. We remember them by name, "eye", "hand", "chair", and by a simple sign that goes with the name. That is handy for getting through life, but when we draw, the sign pushes aside what the eye sees and goes onto the paper in its place. I think this is the main reason a beginner's drawing looks awkward. It isn't that the hand is clumsy. It is that we draw what we know instead of what we saw.

Drawing fast didn't help

The usual advice is gesture drawing: draw quickly, within a short time limit, and there is no time to think, so you draw what you see. For me it worked the other way. With no time, I fell back on the signs my hand already knew and got it over with.

What the good drawings had in common

Of everything I have drawn, I like about one drawing in a hundred. Looking back at those, I found they had things in common.

• I didn't like them at first.
• Lines I didn't like, drawn from symbols, were still there on the paper.
• Some of those lines turned out to help. Looking at them, I could see that a line belonged right here.

A good drawing was never a finished picture in my head, copied onto paper. It was a line found by looking at the marks already on the paper. Drawing from imagination turned out to be seeing, too. What you look at is not a thing in front of you but the line you just drew.

A beginner can hardly know a line in advance. So what needs practice is not knowing the line, but finding it.

The exercises I built

Every exercise in Right Drawing is there to leave symbols less room to step in.

Find. You are given a blurred figure of a person. It has no outline and no features, so there is nothing to trace and nothing to name. You sketch light lines over it freely, letting them overlap, and then draw only the lines you can see in those marks.

Dots. On a blank page, before you draw a line, you place dots where it will go. A line drawn without thinking comes out as a sign, but when you fix its place one point at a time, habit has a hard time getting in. You can also keep a reference image beside the page while you draw.

Today. Everyone gets the same figure for the day. Once you have drawn it, you can see how other people read the same figure. People see different lines in the same mass. There is no right answer.

Who this is for

• You want to draw well, but don't know what to practice.
• You can draw well enough from observation, but without a reference your drawings look like a child's.
• You have practiced a fair amount, and your drawings still come out stiff and awkward.

There are no scores and no rankings. You don't have to draw well. A few minutes of nothing but looking is enough. You can start drawing right away, without signing up.