I’ve got a challenging question for you – Why do you want to draw?
This might be a tough question to answer and one that I often struggle to answer myself. For many of us, creating and drawing is just something that we desperately want to do, but don’t really know why. It’s like you get a craving for putting marks down on paper, but trying to explain to someone why you want to do that can be a really challenging task.
Some of the benefits of drawing are quite obvious. It can give us self-esteem. Drawing gives us a rather difficult challenge to master and when we are successful it gives us a great feeling of satisfaction. Perhaps that on its own is enough reason to draw?
It gives us a method of story telling. We can create imaginary scenarios and depict them as drawings to tell a story.
It gives us a method of communicating our ideas to the world. We can invent new ideas or technology and share our vision as artwork for the world to see.
Art has been something that we all connect to since our beginnings as cave-people. Throughout our history drawing has been used to tell stories, depict and record historical events, document nature, scientific record keeping, teaching, inventing, advertising, humor and just for fun.
Throughout every society of humans, art has played a sometimes subtle yet major role in our development. Without art, much of our history would still remain a mystery. It has served as a fantastic record keeping device across different languages and cultures. It is a universal method of communication, while writing requires the viewer to understand the language in which it is written, drawings can be looked at and understood by anyone irrespective of their cultural background.
But the result of art isn’t necessarily the purpose for the artist. I’m sure that most artisans weren’t aware that their creations would be held as historical record keeping devices. For the artisan, they just want to create and may not really know why.
For me I was fortunate enough that my early drawings were recognisable and I received attention from others because I could do that. As a 5 year old, that encouragement that I was being given by other people was enough to inspire me to keep drawing. The attention that I earned from drawing throughout my childhood was the gratification that was driving me to learn more. It wasn’t until much later in life that I started to question why I continue to draw and what I want to achieve with my drawings.
Although the answer is somewhat clearer in my thoughts, it is still a question that I challenge myself with often. Sometimes the answer is different, Sometimes it is just to be creative, or express an idea, or just because I can. Other times I want more purpose, and I challenge myself to have more reason for drawing. Teaching other people how to draw is often my inspiration and purpose.
I think that we all want to tell our story. Drawing is one method for telling the world what we like, how we feel and what we are thinking. It is a way to challenge conventions, ideals or cultures without being insulting. Drawing can be a form of escapism from reality, where we can momentarily forget about what is real and invent our own imaginative worlds. We can create anything that our minds can conceive. We could potentially reshape the future with innovative ideas in our drawings.
So I guess the question shouldn’t be why do you want to draw, perhaps it should be “What do you want to do with your drawing skills?”. Learning how to draw can open up new opportunities for us to depict our ideas and share those ideas to make an impact on the world around us.
What a great reason to start a new drawing today.
If you are still struggling to draw, I’m working on an exciting new program to help you. I expect to be launching it in the new year. I’ll be sending through more details over the coming weeks. This new program may be the boost that you have been waiting for.
Happy Drawing,
Murray
