Drawing is a skill you can learn. Drawing is NOT a talent you must be born with. Drawing takes both time and effort, like any other skill you want to learn.
Talent does exist in drawing just like any other skill, but the talent is simply a starting point.
By actively drawing while learning you will be able to develop your drawing skill and take it from that starting point to the next level.
I provide and explain the proof for all these statements and what they mean in detail throughout this blog.
I say all this assuming you may have googled if drawing was a talent or a skill because you are looking into drawing as a hobby or settling a debate with a friend.
If drawing is something that interests you, rejoice and keep reading because you CAN learn to draw. If you bet that it was a talent and it was just a debate sorry to disappoint 🙂
Why Drawing is A Skill You Can Train and NOT Just a Talent
It’s so controversial even dictionary.com is in on it xD
But seriously, as you can see from the definition – talent is the natural aptitude.
Drawing itself is not natural, it is something we create. Whether by humans or machines, drawings are something made not already existing in nature. They are our graphical depictions of objects in nature or in our mind.
I promise this is as philosophical as it gets. I want to take the concept of drawing from its root to show you how it is indeed a skill and not only talent.
Talent is a Start for Drawing but Can’t Replace Knowledge & Experience
Talent in drawing is just a base. Perhaps naturally you’re able to draw smooth and straight lines or shapes. Some people are even naturally talented to the point where they can accurately portray shading, perspective, and anatomy when drawing.
But review talented people’s drawings who haven’t had any teaching and you will see why drawing is a skill and not a talent.
While at first glance their drawings may look good they will almost always have some inconsistencies and mistakes because they lack knowledge and experience.
They don’t know how to shade accurately for directional light sources. Anatomy in their drawings will definitely have issues including some incorrect proportions, slanted features, unnatural details, etc. Perspective will be inconsistent and incorrect in some parts of their drawings.
All these mistakes are bound to happen due to the simple fact that they do not know the correct way to capture these elements. Especially when you take into account most talented people are working from reference. Have them draw from their imagination and it is guaranteed that these mistakes will be more common and apparent as they now have to rely much more heavily on their own knowledge in their mind to depict something visual.
Experience and knowledge are necessary to be able to improve your drawing and correct errors no matter how talented you are.
Surgeons Research Drawing and Scientifically Prove it is A Skill
How Do You Look?, an exhibition about surgery, painting, and perception at the Hunterian Museum, Royal College of Surgeons, London proved the similarities between drawing and surgery in hand-eye coordination. The exhibition completed 12 optical tests including playing football, pick-up sticks, drawing, and surgery. I originally discovered this exhibition in my research in this article, “A steady eye.” in the BMJ : British Medical Journal . I also dug deeper and found the link to the Royal College of Surgeons original annual report that discusses the exhibition here.
Again I would like to point out this was an exhibition at a surgeons’ college so no bias from artists claiming drawing was a skill. Surgeons who spent years at these colleges were the ones experimenting with this exhibition.
The findings from the exhibition concluded that memory and experience can be as important as the natural sensory data from your eyes. Proving that the learning and developing skills in these tasks contributed to the results in them.
Hospitals and patients wouldn’t spend millions paying surgeons if they didn’t spend 11 years in school and residency. FIFA, NBA, and NFL teams wouldn’t spend millions on coaching staff and facilities if the players hadn’t spent years in the sports.
Drawing uses the same hands, eyes, and brain people use in those occupations. It requires learning and repetition just the same. The type of learning and practice to develop it as a skill is all that changes.
Improve Your Drawing by Using Your Mind and Hand-Eye Coordination
To create drawings, we use our hands, our eyes, and our minds. All of which we can train and develop for the application of drawing. By repetition and study our hands, eyes, and mind are able to improve.
Surgeons, athletes, martial artists, and musicians all use varying degrees of hand eye coordination to develop their craft through practice, learning, and repetition. Drawing and art is no different.
No one is naturally talented enough to be any type of surgeon, or one of the best soccer or football players, or the most popular musician. Surgeons require 11-16 years of school and residency at a hospital. Most top tier athletes and musicians are raised from a very young age playing their sports and instruments respectively.
At the end of the day if you think about it – if they never had that training how would they be able to do the things they do? They wouldn’t. Drawing is the same, if you’ve never drawn people before you can’t expect to be able to draw a photo realistic portrait.
I can play basketball but compare me to NCAA college players and I wouldn’t be able to keep up. Even though I’m naturally relatively athletic and better at other sports (LETS GO VOLLEYBALL.) I never practiced basketball while they did. So I could perform at an average level but in comparison to them it would be very poor.
To relate it back to drawing this would be the difference between someone who could do a flat simple line drawing of a face and an artist who is able to draw a fully shaded face with perspective and details as per the examples below.
Learn How to Improve Your Drawing by Studying Drawings
Just like any other skill, to improve drawing you must learn. How do you learn? Go to the experts or those you aspire to draw like and observe their drawings.
Start with the basics, what genre are they in? Landscapes, portraits, still lifes, abstract etc. Is that the genre you’d like to go into? If so, break it down further – Is it 2d, 3d, hyper realistic, photo realistic, color, or black and white?
Study drawings and art to find these things out and take notes.
Once you study drawings you’ll begin to notice some general subjects that are almost universal.
These include shading, perspective, and line work. These are parts of drawing that you will only learn over time by studying and applying in your own drawing.
Try to emulate artists you enjoy and aspire to be like, even copy their work to practice. By copying them you can see exactly where you go wrong and what you do right so you know what to work on next.
Taking note of these things and consciously correcting them in your future drawing will keep you actively learning and improving.
Relying on your own observations is not enough, you should seek knowledge from the experienced artists themselves and ask questions to guide your study.
In this way, you will maximize the knowledge and experience you gain and improve your own drawing.
Drawing Skills to Actively Learn: Lines, Shapes, Shading, Perspective, Anatomy
Needing to actively learn and consciously try to improve yourself is just more proof of why drawing is a skill you learn and not a talent.
A talented person who can draw can be better at the start however the moment someone less talented pursues learning more than them they will eventually surpass them.
When you start practicing and learning you will have more mistakes to learn from and more references to compare to. Especially if you are copying artists existing pieces. The more pieces you have the more different lines, levels of shading, angles of perspective you have experience drawing.
As long as you actively track your progress from that experience you will be able to avoid more mistakes.
If your lines aren’t straight, solid, or consistent weights at first you can draw lines, then draw more lines, annnnd more lines. You’ll notice yourself that after repeating this exercise you’ll be able to draw better lines which will dramatically improve all your drawings and take your skill to the next level.
That is a more efficient approach to improve line work specifically, however any drawing including copying will improve your lines.
Through repetition your eyes will be able to capture your intended lines and guide your hands to complete straight lines in one motion without hesitation and shaking.
The same applies to all these other parts of drawing: shapes, shading, perspective, anatomy.
Through repetition and applying the principles you learn in each of these foundational elements you will be able to improve your drawing skills.
Now It’s Your Turn – Level Up Your Drawing Skill
As I have proven to you in this blog, drawing is indeed a skill NOT a talent.
If you study experts, actively learn, implement teachings, repeatedly draw you can develop drawing just like any other skill.
I hope you enjoyed/benefited from this blog.
I will be working on more relevant blogs in drawing, digital art, and similar topics so make sure to check back on my site if that is stuff you’re into.
Thank you.
