i had a conversation yesterday with accomplished engineers from vmware and openai.
pen, paper, and whiteboards have been invaluable tools for them, but they were surprised to find that out in hindsight.
we discussed about the counter-intuitive short-comings of digital tools: a lack of contraints constraints creativity. digital whiteboards like figma have infinite canvases; most to-do list apps have infinite lists. but, a sticky note has so much space before you run out of it, so you intuitively think... maybe i should not keep adding tasks to this thing.
there is also the aspect of object permanence and the link between memory and multi-modal sensory stimuli. in other words, if you can feel the thing, you can remember the thing better.
Art school grad. First of all it takes a lot of practice to be able to reach the level of simplicity and clarity of the illustrations in that article. In many ways this is harder than drawing in a very realistic manner. Saying that:
1. Do exercises from books. Doesn't matter what but things like - how to shade a cube, using negative space, draw 50 horses etc. Also do restriction exercises. Draw in a continuous line, use cross hatching or other patterns for shading, paint in black and white etc. These are all about getting comfortable with the process of drawing and putting pencil to paper.
2. Still life. Draw what is around you then draw what is in what is around you (reflections, shadows, colours). Try drawing your own reflection in a spoon.
3. Life classes. Humans are attuned to the human form by evolution, so drawing humans accurately is uniquely hard. You will also learn to draw fast as in a traditional life class poses usually go from very short dynamic poses (30 seconds - 1 min of someone standing on 1 leg) to short (2-3 mins), to 10 minute poses, finishing with a 30 min-hour pose.
4. Doodle! Keep a note pad with you at all times and doodle in bursts while waiting for tests to run, on the tube, in meetings. After not very long you'll be able to do other things while you doodle.
5. Don't use a computer for drawing until you can draw IRL. Making mistakes and being comfortable with not undoing them is important. Often the process of exploring or covering up mistakes spurs creativity and getting the tool out of the way and concentrating on the process is important.
6. Copy great works, even if you don't like them. Investigate the techniques used, the composition, the materials. See if you can find good day and bad day examples of a masters work and work out what separates them. It will also make you feel better when you realise that even the most valorized ot artists sometimes produce rubbish.
7. Change it up! Don't do the above in order, do a bit of each whenever you can. If you plateau do things like draw with your weak hand for a week, or try inverting what you draw when you draw it, or draw things in incongruous positions or situations. Create a baby's mobile of weird objects, hang it above you and draw them from below. That sort of thing.
8. Share your work and ask for feedback. If you can, do this in IRL so when someone says "I don't like this aspect" you can dig in and work out what they don't like. The internet does not facilitate this kind of discussion as so many comments are drive by / trolling.
As far as I know, the main thing is to do a lot of it, and with purpose.
Depending on your personality, this may be a big ask — if you get discouraged or distracted easily, for instance.
On the other hand, it's a very accessible skill: pen and paper are easy to come by.
Personally, I've always felt rewarded by doing it. It soothes something in me, so I haven't had the struggle with self-motivation that some report.
I think that's a key to getting good at many things, really: find some emotional satisfaction from what you're doing, and the motivation will follow. As opposed to simply saying "I want to be good at X" and mechanically pushing yourself to do it. If you don't have some baseline love for the activity, you may learn to dread it, by that approach.
Darren rouaar's 'drawing from the sight size cast'. Pick up a used copy for cheap probably. That and his memory drawing book.
He describes a semi-traditional method which is way more than you technically need. But just reading about the method will inform you of a practical approach to begin drawing what you see or have seen. It's like K&R for drawing, lots of 'Oh that's how it works'.
Seriously though, these seem like good steps for getting started. Just start scribbling to get your hand warmed up, then redraw and refine and keep practicing.
An hour a day is a massive commitment for most people with lives (work, family etc.) You can get very meaningful progress in drawing with much less. Don’t be discouraged from starting.
> An hour a day is a massive commitment for most people with lives (work, family etc.) You can get very meaningful progress in drawing with much less. Don’t be discouraged from starting.
I use a cheap toy[1] I got for my kid, who got tired of it. It stays next to my keyboard and I doodle drawing exercises whenever I get tired of typing.
A minute here, a minute there, and next thing I know I've completed quite a few of the exercises (about 30m/day, if all the individual minutes are added up).
Works very well, and enforces drawing from the shoulder and not the wrist.
Nice. For anyone getting an LCD tablet for drawing, look for one like the link above where the drawing area is all one color. My kids have one with a rainbow gradient, which I find annoying -- especially because the darkest/lowest contrast color goes right across the middle in the prime drawing area!
even doing < 5 min a day of learning a new language sees results in a year. drawing probably has a higher startup cost to get into things but i'd expect 10min to be sufficient.
something to consider is that you can really do most beginner drawing exercises & rudiments with only a fraction of your attention so it is pretty easy to draw while doing other things. if you watch tv/commute/cook meals/go out to eat/listen to books & podcasts/use a laundromat/ etc,etc you can use that as supplemental drawing time as well. you can start with basic coordination exercises (drawing lines, circles & ellipses) and work your way up to observational drawing and dynamic sketching practice.
i did some of my most productive studying on the bus or in hospital waiting rooms. even with a fulltime job i would say that 5-6 hours of drawing in a day is very achievable without much sacrifice. you don't need to be that serious about it, but you probably have more time than you think.
To learn drawing it has to click in your head. I couldnt draw for life and then I read "drawing on the right side of the brain" and now Im drawing portraits
I love this! I especially love Ralph’s clarity of thought and his delivery of complex ideas through such simple writings and drawings.
And the best part is: I can imagine how much work each one of his article takes! Mainly because I have tried writing in a manner similar to Ralph’s myself [1], and I found it is not easy to articulate complex topics in an easy-to-digest manner. Drawings help to lower the barrier to understanding, and Ralph knows this very well.
After we have taken in as much information as possible, we now want to go “crazy” and draw as many ideas as possible.
But what if our mind goes blank and we don’t have any?
Then we still need to draw.
Ok, but what?
Anything! Just put that pen on the paper and keep it moving. Scribble, make random marks and shapes. This will kickstart our visual thinking process.
rough sketches
And what are we thinking about? New plant pots of course! We draw everything that comes to mind. Everything! Those drawings just keep pouring from our mind through our hands on that sheet of paper. We have created a loop where our imaginations turn into drawings and those drawings initiate new imaginations.
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This is eerily similar to (my understanding) of how AI image generation works.
I think software is often seen as a "rapid development" process, esp. when compared to hardware development. But somewhat ironically, I find actually writing software to be pretty slow compared to just doodling out ideas on paper, so I tend to do a lot of that first, especially when treading new territory.
On occasion, in a REPL-style environment, I can get some amount of that same freedom of exploration and experimentation at a keyboard, but it's still hard to come close to pencil and paper, for me.
Sometimes I wonder what it would be to have the mind of someone like Tesla, who could reportedly design complex objects in his head, down to the details. The freedom of experimentation in one's own mind is even better than pencil-and-paper, but I have trouble holding on to the details in that mode.
My dev team has now spent more of their career without physical whiteboarding and seems to think of it as a waste of time, so I'm looking for more guides like this, as well as explanation of the psycho-mechanics of why this works.
My understanding is that we think in abstract (we'll say "shapes"), and then to interface with the world, we learn language to bucket objects into words and compost them to describe the "shapes".
I leverage visuals heavily whenever speaking with others (Miro, physical paper or whiteboards), and have trouble communicating with (smart) people who can hold a lot in their head while speaking at length about it without providing concrete references. The transformative process of people getting their thoughts out on paper means
1. they can share context and aren't referring to their "shapes" referentially in their head
2. more than 1 person can see their thoughts concretized and can share context, discuss, and re-shape the thoughts
3. the act of reabsorbing the concrete representation reveals incompleteness that others can contribute to (edge cases, weird use cases)
