How I Learned to Enjoy Drawing
These days, I love to draw. I do it digitally and analog, and go back and forth between which one that I prefer more. It usually depends on what I have immediately available, and there’s the debate between drawing and just simply sketching ideas to get something to paper as a starting point, but it wasn’t always this way.
Years ago, as many different artists stories begin, around Middle School I started becoming more aware of how my artwork looked in comparison to others. Others even would occasionally make comments and suggestions as to what I was drawing and how I could Improve and I HATED it! Since, I have learned to become much more accepting of criticism and even accept it, but back then a 12 year old Tyler absolutely hated any type of criticism outside of “wow this looks amazing!”. For the record, you’re still allowed to use that as a compliment on any of my works whenever you wish.
Anyways, one comment stuck out in particular. “You know, if you did less of a sketchy style, your artwork would probably be a lot better”. That comment has stuck with me until today for some reason. I can’t remember some people’s names that I desperately want to, but gosh darn it, that one struck close to home. I wanted to improve, but doing lots of lines until I got the one I liked was how I would draw, it was MY style and what I did! Plus what did he draw? Like, nothing, that’s what. Except for artwork that was better than mine.
Yes, his criticism was actually what I needed to hear, and it took YEARS for me to finally come to grips with it, I was just sitting comfortably in my lane doing the exact same thing over and over again and expecting different results. I don’t understand how I could ever think that it would result in something different, but trying new things had definitely improved my abilities in the coming years afterwards.
It’s no secret to anyone in my (admittedly small) circle that I am a graphic designer for my day job. That may surprise some people, but no, making artwork and illustration prints and linocut prints on the side do not pay the bills quite yet. I do enjoy my day job, but it does not fulfill my creative passion as much as I would hope. It’s a steady 9-5 that DOES pay the bills, maybe I can touch more on that later.
But this career field is how I got into illustration in the first place. In University I loved doing printmaking, and I’m glad I’m back into it now, but living in a 3-bedroom house and renting out only one bedroom was a bit of a challenge for space. I also was obsessed with bicycles at the time and having 3 in one bedroom takes up a substantial amount of space as well.
I started with making digital illustrations in Adobe Illustrator back when Creative Suite was the hot new deal. Not Creative Cloud, but CS 1, 2 and 3 that you had to buy as a bundle or *cough* find a cracked serial number for *cough* for a digital illustration class in Community College which was admittedly mostly just a class on how to use Adobe Illustrator but had projects that you had to produce artwork for to turn in to prove the skills you had learned. In a way, that professor asking me what my intentions were for after that class and after community college were that inspired me to get to where I am today. If he hadn’t asked me if I was going to apply for the Graphic Design program at the University I have no idea where I would’ve ended up, who knows where I would’ve found my purpose in life.
But that started my love for digital drawing, and that was with a mouse. Not the Wacom tablet but a regular old computer mouse and Adobe Illustrator, clicking away at the anchor points and slowly but surely getting them to logically make sense (even though, as another professor pointed out, they are indeed illogical BUT once you master them they are extremely beneficial). The thing was, I had this issue where I would sit around and WAIT for the right project, that I had all of these skills that I could use to make things look amazing but they had to come to me and were the sole responsibility of my boss to bring me these wonderful assignments. I would get an assignment here or there that I could make something in Illustrator to really help out with a design of some sort but they were few and far between.
This would go on for a few more years in my design career until I started sketching for different logo ideas and band flyer ideas - I did create a few album covers here and there, which I enjoyed, but it took me a while to finally make myself start filling up old sketchbooks from University.
I’m not going to sugar coat it, this took lots of time. I would spend days on the weekends sometimes just trying to fill up pages, I made a challenge once where I took a Moleskine notebook and filled all of the pages in 3 days with different ideas for each page. I incorporated Posca markers, pens, random pencils, drawing pencils, even a few collages with magazines. But the more I would force myself to draw, the better I got, which would create a feedback loop. Because I was getting better, the end results were becoming closer to what I had imagined them to be on a more regular basis. Doing this has also been a great way for me to increase my productivity. More on that later!
Go make some artwork!
