On the advice of my university tutors, I have finally gotten round to picking up a copy of Betty Edwards, “Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain“.

I would advise anyone, especially those who love to create but are convinced they can’t draw, to get a hold of this book. Either from your library, or buy a copy, and really read it, and do all the exercises, as basic as they may seem to you.

Reading through the information, and completing the necessary tasks not only do I know that I (as someone who classes myself as being able to draw) am learning a lot to improve my drawing, but that I am also learning a lot about the mindset of a person who believes they ‘can’t’ draw and learning why I ‘can’ draw and they ‘can’t’.

It is also made clear to me why so many teenage artists are disheartened by their work, and why they feel they might have to turn to other shortcuts, such as tracing or using a base[1], for making art, they won’t get angry at because it’s not what they perceive as ‘good enough’. Having been GM this lack of self confidence has often been a brick wall for me when communicating with various artists withing my gallery, and I only wish I’d read this book sooner, and perhaps I’d have been much more understanding towards many younger artists, instead of just getting frustrated at them.

As children, we draw in symbols. A child will draw a triangle and call it a nose, and a child is happy with this. But a teenager, or older artist who has given up on art but is returning to it, will draw a triangle and know it is not a nose, but may not be able to figure out how to actually draw a nose, because the idea of the symbol is getting in the way of the actual perception of an actual nose.

More than anything it is adults, and critics who kill the desire to learn to draw. Perhaps even well meaning older artists. Drawing, as many of us know, is about practice and passion. A newly emerging artist, whether teenager or adult, should be able to draw whatever the hell they want to, over and over and over again without someone coming along and going “oh another girl in a pretty dress. *snob* ” or “another race car when will you learn to draw something else” or as I hear very often around the internet “ugh more anime shit.”

Anime has it’s faults the same as any other cartoon style. It relies on symbols more than observation, which is why it is far more appealing to someone who is just emerging from the childhood stage of symbolic drawing. But it does emulate humans in a much more accurate way than childish stick figures, inaccurate though giant eyes and triangle noses may be. Anime sits somewhere in between symbol drawing and observational drawing.

Without my love of anime, and my adoration of anything I drew in this style, along with a hoard of mary sueish characters, I would not be the artist I am today. Hell I’d probably not be an artist. Teachers and other online artists tried to tell me “oh anime is wrong, it’s just symbolic crap” etc, but I thank my teenage stubborn self for sticking the metaphorical finger up at the world and continuing to draw it anyway, if I hadn’t I’d probably have (like many adults) given up by now. Though I no longer draw anime at all it taught me passion and it gave me much practice. The older I got, the more real my anime got because the more I understood of the world around me and how to translate that onto paper. You could say I was making a gradual transition between the symbolic and the observational.

It is my opinion that so long as anyone is drawing, (and that’s freehand drawing no bases or traces) then we as more mature artist who ‘can’ draw should be behind them 100%. It doesn’t matter if it’s anime, or fanart, or celebs from photos or comic style, so long as they’re drawing they’re learning. People who won’t draw because they ‘can’t’ have been so put down by other people they have lost the self confidence and the passion to learn, but if they’re still out there being creative, even if it is the dreaded tracing, then they have the passion somewhere inside them, they just need to have the self confidence to try. Who are we to take that away from them?

If you really have the desire to learn more about drawing, no matter your skill level or your genre of drawing choice, I recommend you check out Edwards’s book >Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, because it has really helped me to understand more about myself as an artist, and I hope I will be able to transfer this understanding into my own drawings.

And so, to my fellow artists and creatives…

Keep drawing!

[1] As much as I love to doll for those who perceive that they cannot draw, using a human premade base is the easy option (just as much as tracing is) as opposed to learning to draw humans for yourself.