Friday, September 24, 2010

Learning to Draw

If I got a few wishes, one of them would be that I could draw. Richard Feynman, who at one time shared that wish, described in one of his books his decision to believe that drawing wasn't a skill you either have or don't, and that he could in fact teach himself how to draw, despite having displayed no apparent ability to that point in his life. Turned out that it was pretty well true, at least in his case.

Now, if you know anything about RPF, you can laugh at this as just another one of his clever schemes for getting attractive women to take off their clothes for him. And, of course, it would be the height of folly for me to compare myself to him in any manner. Still, though, I've always kind of wondered … there was that one sketch I made of that football player, and that other one I made of that sleeping dog, and those came out surprisingly well …

Anyway, what made me think again of this occasional longing was noticing that James McMullan's second post on this very topic is up. His first one from last week was "Getting Back to the Phantom Skill" ("The first in a series of columns on how to draw") and the new one is "The Frisbee of Art" ("The ellipse is everywhere, and essential to learning how to draw").

Also, here is the home page for this series, where ten more posts should eventually appear. You may want to bookmark it.

And by "you" I mean "me," obvs.

2 comments:

Kevin Robbins said...

Learning to draw is one of my goals for my jubilacion. Like the spanish word so much better. It looks like jubilation. Thanks for the link, Brendan. It looks to be a great series. Any excuse to get women to take off their clothes.

bjkeefe said...

Oooo, nice word. You're right: it looks good. And I bet it sounds even better than it looks.

y/w for the link. I encourage you to start earlier, so that come the jubilacion, you will be that much further along.

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