Learn-Grow on Drawing

The idea that I should share what I learn rather than what I know (or think I know) has become a guiding principle in my approach to the world lately. It came to me through this blog; I decided that the goal for my posts should be writing about something that interests me, or that I have done, but with the challenge of learning and sharing something new about my subject.

The overall basic principle of it is that we grow through learning. That the chlorophyll of our minds is putting new learned information into it, and that sticking with stale or safe beliefs or pieces of knowledge is petrifying.

This thought process led me to consider what I want to learn more about, and that is how this new category of the blog came into being. My thought is to pick things I’ve always been interested in and to start to learn them, and to share the process with my dear readers.

I’ve been interested in drawing for some time, and I even have notebooks filled with doodles and drawings, but my education in drawing is pretty meager, so for my first Learn-Grow post series I am going to take on the challenge of deepening my knowledge of drawing and in sharing this journey. I am not sure exactly how this path will go, but I think that will also be part of the fun.

Since my time and budget is pretty limited, I am going to start this first through free drawing apps. I hope maybe to turn this into real personal instruction, but one step at a time. After deciding this, I looked around for learn-to-draw programs and websites, and eventually chose one called Drawspace, mainly because it had the interface I liked the most, but I think I’ll try at least a few of them.

The free options are fairly wide ranging here to get started, and for my first two lessons I chose pretty introductory ones: “Welcome to Drawing from Line to Life” and “Enhancing Your Visual Intelligence.”

“Welcome to Drawing from Line to Life,” is, as it sounds, an introduction and didn’t have too much in the way of assigned tasks, although the drawing of these two adorable border terriers (just like my dear dear Coco) warmed my heart (and made me want choke up a little). It also had some interesting information on pencil hardnesses and on sharpening pencils.

The second lesson, “Enhancing Your Visual Intelligence,” was more intriguing for the confines of a long car drive and things to think about on a busy weekend. It is basically a way of thinking about training your brain and vision to actively participate in the creative process.

“You can enhance visual intelligence by challenging your brain to find alternate perceptions beyond the obvious and to identify more than one reality in a single image.”

There are a number of exercises here that I would like to try, so this lesson will probably go over a few posts, but for this weekend the only actual exercise we did was to examine clouds. (In all fairness, something we often do anyway.) On Renee and I’s post-ride walk we looked at and talked about the shapes in the clouds after the rainy day we had on Saturday. In one, I saw a pizza cutter and Renee saw a mermaid fetus, quite an illustration of the variations the brain can pick out of a cloud.

Do you see anything in this sky scape? Leave notes in comments!

More to come soon …