It was always something I had wanted to learn but never committed the time to sit down and learn. Last year while I was on my university exchange to San Francisco State University, I was fortunate enough to pick up Drawing 1 as an elective that counted towards my degree. It was a really good decision.

From day 1 of class we were told that if you thought that this was a bludgey subject, you were going to fail. The parameters were set that we had to complete at least 1 drawing (minimum 30 minutes spent on it) every day and our progress would be recorded relative to our starting skill.

This was my very first drawing.

I soon learnt that drawing was an endurance battle of creativity and focus as our classes were three hours long that tackled new concepts: contour, cross contour, negative space, figure drawing, still life, perspective etc (all your essential techniques).

As the days progressed, it felt as if my drawings were not. It was a frustrating learning curve. But I kept at it and continued to work at improving my drawing skills.

Not only did I feel I was not progressing but we frequently had critiques (a whole class dedicated to posting drawing assignments on the wall to be critiqued by our teacher and peers) where my peers seemed to be improving exponentially. What the hell was I not doing correct.

Most of time spare time I committed myself to practising my fundamentals using youtube as my main source of education. I figured that once I returned to regular work life back home, I wouldn’t have the luxury of time to learning a skill like I did in SF. I was going to improve my drawing.

About two months had passed and my teacher was flipping through my sketch book. She knew I put the effort in but I just wasn’t ‘seeing it’. I’d ask her to do drawing infront of me and it would make sense, as soon as I was left to do it on my own I couldn’t replicate it, something was missing. In that moment I had realised there had to be some sort of book to help me figure out what I wasn’t seeing.

Why didn’t you ask this before? My teacher mentioned that I ought to get Betty Edwards ‘Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain. This book had become my breakthrough. This was not a step by step guide on how to draw a box or a cat. This book helped switch your logical brain thinking to abstract, creative right brain thinking with detailed breakdown of each drawing skill: Perceiving edges, spaces, relationships or perspectives, portraits, and lights and shadows.

It gave you exercises that challenged your logical left brain thinking by using techniques such as drawing upside down and using a slate of glass to draw lines you physically see in front of you.

Just two weeks after reading through the book and completing the exercises my drawings became noticeably better. This was my first breakthrough, understanding thickness of lines in a drawing of a flower.

Here I started to understand shared lines.

Each chapter I was finally seeing what I hadn’t before. Quite literally in this sense, I struggled with understanding negative space. How on earth do you draw something that isn’t there? Drawing On the Right Side of The Brain does a spectacular job of that. Here my negative space drawing exercises from the book!

I’m sure everyone know that glorious feeling when your hard work is paying off and you start to see the results right before your eyes, in that moment you are engrossed in your skill and even more driven to continue. It’s highly satisfying and this is how I felt with my next skill of foreshortening.

Here is a series of my first attempt to my class assignment submission (note you can obviously tell where I put time into that drawing and where I had to do a mad scramble to drawing something after a night out).

Final product. It's a clock going around using hands as the clock hands.

The final chapter of the book outlines to how work out proportions for portrait drawings. It’s something I still struggle with but also learned a valuable lesson from my drawing teacher, COPY THE MASTERS!

But first here is the progression of my portraits before tackling master drawings.

Self portrait, with a fairly large pout.

Experimenting with cross hatching.

Yes that’s right, copy the best and you’ll pick up little nuances that drawing from still life won’t give you feedback about.

This portrait was my biggest breakthrough. My final drawing before I continued travelling North America!

From my shitty iPhone drawing to my final portrait I was immensely proud how far I came and it was several months before I could return to a quiet room and sit for hours working on improving my craft.

And to be truthful (and like I predicted) my time spent drawing decreased but I have kept a few drawings going every month or so, but this time with an understanding of how to see properly.

Here are some drawings I’ve done since I’ve been home.

A massive shoutout to my art teacher at SF State, Lisa, for always pushing me to keep moving forward and help me accept not to compare my art to everyone else’s!