Why You Should Practice Drawing Things Repeatedly
It’s an effective way of building your visual library.
It’s a powerful way to build your visual library
“Don’t fear the man who practiced 10,000 kicks once, but fear the man who has practiced one kick 10,000 times.”
Just extrapolate this into other real-world endeavors
- Cold approaching 10000 girls
- Digging 10000 holes
- Killing 10000 men with your bare hands (in self-defense!)
- Robbing 10000 banks (in… self-defense?)
Your efficiency, pattern acquisition, and effectiveness would be through the roof. How good do you think you’d be at robbing banks if you robbed 10000 of them? 1000? 100? Even at 100, you’re going to be very good at it. I like to think that being able to do something consistently is one of the most powerful forces in this world, and tied very closely is being exposed to the same problem repeatedly. The level of expertise you develop on that one type of problem is masterful.
Drawing is no different. If you know you want to become an all-around better sketcher, you have to draw things over and over again. This should be applied to both large and small scales. For example, a large scale would be drawing cars in general. A small scale would be drawing a particular car repeatedly until it’s burned into your visual library.
Each drawing has a gold mine of information for your brain to extrapolate, and you never get it all out on the first drawing. That’s because It can take multiple attempts of drawing something for the form to actually codify into something that makes sense in your brain.
Here’s an example I pulled from Pinterest:
I picked it specifically for the small black and white sketch in the middle left. The form and cutouts just form an interesting shape and I want to have this reference in my head for the future. Here’s me drawing it over and over again, trying different ways to construct the form:
Yeah, this was even more difficult than I thought. The most confusing parts were the mix of edges and smooth transitions that make up this low-poly form. The bottom middle is the most accurate in that sense, but it still feels like it’s missing something.
After drawing it 6 different times, everything is still fuzzy in my head. Moving forward, I’m going to separately draw the top, middle, and bottom portions to get a better idea.
But at the end of the day, it’s all about strengthening those synapses in your visual library, and the more you practice this, the sooner you’ll be sketching like a natural.
