#202 - This Is What I Learned About YOU (and me)
Just from being on the Discord server!
YouTube Video - Practice Drawing Female Head En Profile, After Heinrich Kley — Web version. I started a Discord Server about a year ago, and I admit I was a bit naive. It started with channels for each chapter in my memory drawing workbook, and a few channels for sketchbook pages.
You lived mostly in the sketchbook channels. You looked at the channels for the exercises of each book chapter and you said, “That’s great! Thank you! I’ll continue on my usual routine, if you don’t mind.”
You design your own curriculum! You have your own ideas about what you want to achieve, what exercises you need to do, and you mostly go online to look for information, tips, tutorials, but it is all in service of fitting in to the curriculum you are designing for yourself.
So I eventually removed the channels dedicated to my exercises.
It appears there are at least two types of you:
1) You may be a beginner who wants their hand to be held. I do see that online, places where you are told exactly what to do, step by step. Read this, watch this video, now do that exercise, and you will be able to draw from imagination.
2) You are like me. You design your own curriculum, searching for bits of information online and in books and from videos, picking what you think you need, and going from there.
Where does Practice Drawing This fit in to this? I really don’t know. I don’t take you by the hand, leading you through lesson material and exercises step by step. I’m just showing you my process, showing you what worked for me.
You’re like me. Or, rather, I’m like you.
When creating a website like Practice Drawing This, it is tempting to start seeing yourself as a teacher, but I’m not. I’m a student, like you.
It strikes me that we would rather need a coach than a teacher. A teacher designs a fixed lesson plan for their students, and that is great, but we seem to be a bit stubborn. We seem to have our own ideas when it comes to what we want to achieve. Maybe we want to learn to draw in a manga style, or maybe we want to make comics, or maybe we want to learn to draw like Kim Jung Gi. And we go look for information.
An artist who is ahead of us could coach us, could help us. Maybe that’s what we often look for when we listen to longer YouTube videos, listening to artists who are ahead of us talking about making art. Fellow artists, coaches, rather than teachers.
Rather than critiquing work, rather than feedback on specific work, we’re looking for someone who has been around the block to tell us which direction we should take in our drawing practice.
It is how the masters used to get trained in the past, how Rembrandt was trained. You’d have guilds. You’d enter as a child, and you’d be mentored by a master, shown the tricks and tools of the trade.
I don’t know if a guild would work today, to be honest. When you became apprenticed with a master artist, you started by sweeping the floor, and then maybe, just maybe, you’d be allowed to grind color pigments much later, and slowly, you’d get trained, copying etchings from other masters first and such.
I don’t think we’d put up with having to sweep the floor when apprenticed today.
“Artist, can I apprentice with you?”
“Yes, sure. Sweep the floor.”
I don’t think we would put up with that now.
A coaching system could work. You could chat with an artist who is ahead of you occasionally, one who can give you tips on what to try based on the direction you want to take.
Maybe that’s why we watch YouTube videos where the artist on screen talks to us and gives us information. It feels like we’re with a coach, a friend guiding us along on our path.
Coaching takes time; it takes time away from what the intended coach wants to do, which is to draw, too, just like you and I. Because the coach is just like you, they are also just an art student. They are just ahead of you.
I guess a mentorship could work, but isn’t a mentorship just coaching but done for free? That would be asking a lot from experienced artists.
The current teaching model where there is a fixed curriculum for all students, that one size fits all approach, doesn’t seem to quite fit, as you and I are quite individualistic about our wishes, desires, and approaches.
That is why I left art academy after three years. They wanted to train me to become a painter, and I wanted to become an editorial cartoonist. It just didn’t fit. It wasn’t personalized to what I wanted to achieve, the path I was desiring to take.
Coaching, mentoring me on my path would have been way more useful back then. They could have given me tips and advice based on what I wanted to achieve, exercises tailored to my own personal goals.
How do we set up such a coaching system so that it benefits everyone? Because that is what we all ultimately want, I think, someone to guide us on our way, our own chosen path. We get stuck drawing, and can use a helping hand pulling us out.
You and I want coaching and mentorship, not one-size-fits-all courses. Without that, we scour the internet for information, trying to figure it out on our own.
This Week
In keeping with the theme of this week’s article, there a few new things on the website. One fits in the one-size-fits-all category, the other in the category of information you search for.
There are several courses online that give you assignments to draw interlocking forms from imagination, but they tend to have precious little information on how to do that. Someone emailed me to ask me if there was a non-mathematical tutorial on it.
So I created one. I gave it a pompous name:
You can also do it as a warm-up flashcard.
I’ll be honest: I only made this guide because it might be something people search for, leading them to the website.
The one-size-fits-all thing that I hope I will be remembered for, though, is memory drawing. I think it is the Swiss army knife of practice. You can practice anything with it much more efficiently and intensely. And it is intense. But very effective.
It dawned on me that I didn’t have a dedicated system for memory drawing on the website. I have 3D Models, Flashcards, Timed Drawing, and memory was not a first-class citizen among them. I fixed that this week. I took the Timed Drawing system and created a Memory Drawing Game from it .
You are not searching for this, though, yet. Maybe one day, when this method of learning to draw has proven itself, more people will look for it.
Peter Han’s Dynamic Sketching course was developed by his teacher Norman Schureman, who honed the course over a long time. It’s only recently that the idea of being able to break things down into simpler forms started to resonate with students, and so people are searching for this type of information online. My 3D models do well on Pinterest, for example, signalling that people are collecting these into boards for later drawing practice reference.
Kim Jung Gi drew from memory a lot. People who try to follow in his tracks seem to gravitate toward breaking things down into simplified forms. It’s not a bad approach. Both develop your instincts. But I believe there are great advantages to drawing from memory.
Maybe, one day, memory drawing will prove itself, and your (grand)children will go in search of information.
This is what Kim Jung Gi himself said about memory drawing in several interviews.
Yours sincerely,
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