Learning to Draw

One time back in high school I said a really nasty thing about one of my co-authors for the podcast I was producing for the school newspaper. It felt justified at the time, maybe because I really wanted to impress people with this podcast, maybe because I was doing really well in my writing class, or maybe because it's just what I actually believed at the time. I said that "some people have a creative spark, and others don't, and this person's writing doesn't have that spark."

The reason I'm telling you this is because that is complete and utter bullshit^[1]. If anyone (even me) ever tells you that the world is divided on the lines of the talent haves and have-nots they are both incorrect and unkind.

I know this because I learned how to draw.

I've actually been told by several people from professors to friends to colleagues that my artistic potential is lacking. It wasn't until about a year ago that I showed an artist friend the little code projects I had collected over the years that generate some sort of graphical output that I realized I've been creating art for a long time. The medium is very different, and the skills are not transferable, but at the end of the day I learned that the "spark" has far less to do with an innate quality and far more to do with experience. I had been making art forever, but I knew nothing about charcoal, I knew JavaScript!

Fast forward to today where I'm taking a drawing class, and I'm capturing things on the page in ways that I would have looked at a couple of months ago and said, "Wow, that's beautiful, I wish I could do something like that."

Moral of the story: Learn your medium, take time to practice, put in the hours to iterate, and you can make art. It's easier than you think. It's more universal than you think. We're all doing it, all the time. It's human nature.

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