Learning how to draw

I can't draw. I've never been able to. Yet, for some reason, I decided to give it a serious try, buy a book to guide me in that journey (listening to an advice from pippin, yeah I know, crazy). The first step was, like a pilgrim walking to a sacred place, to go and buy some art supplies, which turned out to be a really enjoyable experience.

The first thing you have to do is a snapshot of your skills before reading more of the book to be able to do a "before/after" comparison. I thought it was quite hard, but was surprised that the result was all right, by my low standards anyway. You have to do 3 drawings: a self-portrait, looking at yourself in a mirror, a person/character drawn from memory without a visual help and your hand.

The next exercise is there to make you realize that you'll have to forget everything you know and re-learn how to see to draw. It's about copying drawings upside down, copying it curve by curve without associating any meaning to what you are doing. The result is quite surprising as you can see on the left. Now it's a matter to learn how to do that without resorting to the upside down trick.

It's only the beginning of a long journey, so many things can go wrong, but worth giving it a try!