I’m in the School of Art, so I make drawings very often, many of which are not very good. In high school, I barely completed any sketchbooks, but in 2024, I went through four of them. Part of what was holding me back when I was younger was the fear of making bad drawings. I had seen beautiful sketchbook tours and assumed that all good artists had sketchbooks filled with good drawings. Not wanting to feel like an unskilled rube, I just didn’t do very many sketchbook drawings. This was a problem since it meant I was making less work and taking less artistic risks than I could have been.
The other problem with my approach was that I was thinking about drawing as merely a means of creating completed work. But today, I think about drawing differently: as thinking, understanding, and extending memory.
Drawing is thinking. It’s the quickest and most direct way to work something out visually. Any time there are options for something you are working on, you can lay out those options by making marks. Once these marks are there, you can then then make judgments about them. When in the common position of not knowing what options exist, you can start to explore by marking some marks on paper and seeing where they lead you.
Drawing is understanding. Do you think you know what Bart Simpson looks like? Stop reading and try drawing him from memory. Unless you’ve really studied Bart Simpson, your drawing will probably be a little wonky (this is evident by the School of Drama’s dramaturgy lobby display for “Mr. Burns, A Post Electric Play”). Wonky Bart Simpsons are one of the greatest things a person can draw because they reveal our visual understanding of an image we’ve seen and been influenced by for over 30 years. When you make drawings, you reveal your understanding of things. After drawing, you can then evaluate whether your understanding is satisfactory or not. Maybe I’m trying to make a diagram of a circuit I’m building. By drawing it out, I can see whether or not I actually understand the circuit.
Drawing, like writing, helps us extend our memories onto an external surface. Normally we use photos to remember our travels, or information on a flyer, or a special occasion. Much more could be written about how photographs are deceptive transformations of visual phenomenon. However, even if we hold photos to be depictions of an objective reality, they often have trouble getting at the affective quality of memory. Your smartphone probably can’t capture how the moon felt on a particular night. Further, spending time physically making a representation of something helps you remember that thing better than spending half of a second taking a snapshot on your phone.
Nowhere in this article has the justification for making drawings been dependent on those drawings being good. Making a bad drawing can help one think, it can help one understand something, and it can help extend their memory. So go out there, grab some paper, grab something to make marks with, and fill up your sketchbooks with bad drawings.
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