How to teach yourself to draw

Recently I’ve been teaching myself to sketch with a pen in my notebook. It’s been a fun and rewarding experience, so I thought I’d share the rough steps of what I’ve been doing to get a little better at drawing. Follow along, and I hope you have some fun!

1. Start doodling in a nearby sketch book. Small designs, stick figures, anything really.
   • Start looking up tutorials on drawing fun but simple things. These give you some nice momentum, and feel great!
   • Try to learn how to draw faces better. Give up quickly because it’s hard (especially lips for some reason).
   • Start learning perspective for the first time. This is much easier and you know you’re doing it right.
2. Find out that fineliner sketching is a whole thing and looks super cool.
3. Stumble upon YouTube videos of Kim Jung Gi drawing.
   • Become awestruck.
   • He’s seems so nice, and he draws with a fluency that looks effortless.
   • Start looking at his bigger pieces. Some combine like 6 different perspective types in one page, and you can feel the story in the different sections, even though it’s just one large picture. He seems so cool.
   • Watch tons of videos of him drawing, and talking, and explaining his process.
4. Learn that he died.
   • Learn that he died in 2022.
   • Learn that he was 47.
5. Get sad/Stop drawing.
   • Feel like you missed the boat on meeting another cool person.
   • Imagine all the cool and interesting people you will never be able to meet.
   • Realize that list will only grow over time.
   • Wonder to yourself how you’re supposed to move through the world to meet the most cool people.
   • Think to yourself This guy just seemed like a normal dude. Would I have even known how cool he was if I'd just met him at a coffee shop?
   • Continue this thread in your head: In fact, that’s a big part of what makes him so cool; He’s not some bizarre outlier living in the mountains, he’s just a down to earth guy. I might be meeting people like him all the time and never know it.
   • Realize that you can’t be sure, no matter what you do, that you’re meeting all the cool people in your neighboorhood, let alone in the entire world.
   • Begin to worry that, even if you could find all the cool people around you, would they think you’re cool too?
   • Worry to yourself: Would they even want to talk to me? I'm not as good at anything as they are at the things they do. What would we even do?
6. Begin having some light existential panic, and wonder if you have still have time to become a cool person?
   • Worry about if you’re fundamentally capable of anything cool, even with infinite time.
   • Feel embarrassed about this thought
   • Try to imagine how you would feel if you got to where Gi, or any of the other cool people ended up.
   • Wonder if there even is a feeling that’s associated with that level of accomplishment, or if they feel like you do now (horrifying).
   • Wonder if, from the beginning, these people have felt the way they do right now about whatever their chosen activity is, and that for them, it’s more about the activity being fun than it being meaningful?
   • Let it occur to you that you may be overly burdened with words like genius, greatness, and passion.
   • Realize that true greatness is probably accomplished through people doing things they enjoy or are already compelled to do.
   • Realize that in order to achieve greatness, you might have to abandon your desire for greatness.

WARNING

Your brain may short circuit at this thought. It’s recursive and it’s a mild form of paradox. Don’t worry, this is completely normal. Feel free to move on from this step and don’t wait for that feeling to resolve. For more information, see: Leap of Faith

7. Begin to focus on what things you actually enjoy doing (This may be buried in the options, but dig around and you should be able to find it somewhere).
   • Realize this feels alien, and not entirely good.
   • Get side tracked, and wonder how many other things you’ve pursued without liking them, only for this abstract notion of having a passion.
   • Get more sidetracked, and wonder where that idea came from.
8. Think too much about your childhood.
9. Think about passion (with dread if you have any laying around).
   • Think about people who have told you to seek your passion. Everyone has a true passion, you just have to try enough things until you find yours.

NOTE

You may also, or instead, have had people tell you things like:

• You’re great right now, but you could be so much better.
• Trying new things should only be done in service of finding your passion.
• Some unknown activity out there will set your soul on fire.

These will all do in a pinch, but ideally you’re going to want some mix of all of the above. Pick and chose whichever sound fun!

10. Feel ashamed that you’ve never loved an activity enough for it to qualify as your passion.

• Wonder, with unexpected fear, that maybe having one passion isn’t the only axis of meaning, and maybe the way you are right now has some potential for a meaningful life.
• Wonder if the people that have singular passions might actually be fundamentally different from you.
• Immediately ditch all of that “there might be multiple axis of meaning” bullshit, and have a wave of terror when you consider that you may physically be incapable of having that kind of relationship with any activity.
• Give up more ground here and wonder if you stop yourself from enjoying activities if you think you don’t enjoy them enough to qualify as a passion. Is this why you stop doing things once you start to get good at them? It would make sense if you feel like you’re wasting time unless the activity “counts” as your passion. Maybe you’re not lazy or broken, you’ve just been expecting too much from what you do, and, in a vicious circle kind of way, that’s made it much harder to enjoy any activity.

11. Wonder if all this contemplation is simply an excuse to not do the boring work of practice and study that’s required to be great.

NOTE

If you can, try to wonder this simultaneously with the last set of thoughts. This will cause a lot of nice cognitive dissonance, and will have the added bonus of making you feel really smart and special because you heard one time that the mark of intelligence is to be able to hold two conflicting ideas in your head at the same time.

Remember to feel some embarrassment that you care so much about feeling smart.

Maybe it’s easier to think that nothing you’ll do is meaningful, than it is to just do the work.

12. Draw some pretty clouds!