You don't need talent to start
What really happens when you keep showing up, and why I think that talent is mostly a myth.
Last weekend I had a stall at an art market. As part of my display I always include a couple of sketchbooks, for people to flick through and see where some of the images I sell as prints, calendars or cards have come from. It’s always lovely to talk to people about the drawings - the local places they recognise, my many drawings of my cat, and what materials I use.
But there’s another comment that keeps returning, and it’s not as lighthearted as the others. Lots of people say something like “Oh…it must be so nice to draw like that. I wish I was good at drawing”.
My slightly awkward reply of ‘You could be’, said with a bit of a nervous giggle, doesn’t really express what I mean. So here’s a post about it.
Fear can stop us doing things we would enjoy
‘Ok hold up Carys I’m not scared of drawing’ you might be thinking. Ok, let me re-phrase.
Our preference for being comfortable can prevent us from discovering new things
Better? Ok. Let’s go with that. I should probably start by saying that I think it’s very reasonable to want to be comfortable. This is the reason I haven’t got back into running - something I only discovered I could enjoy, very briefly, during the pandemic - because I dread the uphill battle to regain cardio fitness and the feeling of failure that it gives me when I can’t make it past a couple of kilometers without needing to stop. Would it be painful? Yes. Would it be worth it? Also yes. With drawing, or anything creative - or actually anything - the exact same applies.
Enjoyment can be the bar. I’m probably not going to run a marathon, run competitively, or be in the Olympics. But that doesn’t mean I couldn’t enjoy it - just for its own sake. And this is the same for drawing.
So when people say “Oh…it must be so nice to draw like that. I wish I was good at drawing”, maybe the first thing I should say is that those two statements don’t have to go together. It doesn’t matter if you’re good at drawing - certainly not initially. But you could try it anyway, because you might enjoy it.
There’s no shortcut (sorry)
If from trying something new you do find you enjoy it, and you’d like to do more of it, and hey - maybe you’d even like to make a career out of it - then you might start to think about what it’d take to become ‘good’. I’m keeping the parentheses in because I want us to remember everyone’s view of this is different and that enjoyment and practice is probably more important.
If we get to the point when we want to improve our skills at something it’s very reasonable to want to be comfortable and skip the part where we have to practice, do our scales and arpeggios, keep increasing the reps, stay writing words on a page - or whatever it might be. When I worked more regularly as an actor, learning lines was something I didn’t terribly enjoy but had to do. There was no shortcut. AI can’t do it for us.. But desire to skip our practice will also, just like not trying something in the first place, stop us from expanding our experiences.
For me, who wanted to get better at drawing from life, this practice looked like drawing often. I would draw in gaps of time that would otherwise not be very creative - my commute, my lunchbreak, my nights on the sofa watching TV. And all of these little snippets of time added up made a lot of practicing.
Here are some early sketchbook drawings.
I’ve spoken before about all the other things, aside from actually improving my drawing, in this post. They are many and far reaching - which again supports my point about ‘good’ not being the goal.
Working in children’s books, I can’t help add in a sentence about the fantastic, enviable lack of self consciousness that children have when it comes to trying new things and doing them just for pure enjoyment and expression. We bought my son, who is one and a half, one of those magnetic drawing boards, which has become an obsession. Playing with it, he made a series of expressive marks, pointed and roared. ‘A lion!’ we exclaimed. He gave himself a round of applause.
This is my own drawing, apparently of a tiger, aged 2.
And here’s a drawing from one from a couple of weeks ago, some 30 odd years later.
Now, I’m not trying to say that this recent drawing is necessarily ‘good’. But I do think there are some concrete things I can see have improved:
This drawing captures a whole scene - this is something I was very fearful of in the early days
This drawing uses colour - again, this was too much to think about initially
This drawing uses more than one material - this isn’t of itself a proof of ‘good’, but it does perhaps demonstrate the time spent practicing, and trying new things
It’s not perfect. But thank God it isn’t! If I’d wanted something 100% accurate then I’d have just taken a photo. Or lots of them. But a sketchbook drawing, with all its quirks and wonkiness, can capture so much more than just how something looked.
So I wish I’d remembered all of this at the market so I could encourage those people who looked rather wistfully at my sketchbooks to start drawing. To start drawing anyway! I wish I could grab them by the lapel and shout BUT NO YOU ACTUALLY COULD DO THIS TOO YOU KNOW and maybe get escorted out by security. I didn’t do that. Because I preferred to be comfortable and say something polite.
But I’m saying it to you now. Let this be your invitation to start.
Things I’m enjoying:
I watched the Orange Beak Studio talk with Phoebe Wahl, which was just as inspiring as I hoped it would be and more
My son and I have been enjoying reading ‘Alan’s Big, Scary Teeth’ by Jarvis
Seeing the seasons change over to Autumn, which might just be my favourite seasonal change of all
Other places you can find my work:
I have zines of my sketchbooks, which you can find here.
On Wednesday 1st October I’ll also open preorders of my sketchbook calendars 2026
My portfolio and past work is on my website
As always you can also support my work through my online shop
Shared!😊 I hear this so often.