Birds Are Made Of Feathers

"A Bird Made of Feathers" Ryan Fairbanks

The comedian Sean Lock said, “Birds are made of feathers, everybody knows that”. He was saying it in a joke about the fanciful but believable lies we tell children, but I’ve always loved that idea. We can tell fanciful but believable lies to ourselves when we are drawing. It can help to imagine that the insides of something are not fixed anatomy, but mouldable and invented. This way of thinking can inspire a lot fun creativity and keep things playful and fresh.

Cave paintings are fantastic examples of this. The cave artists recreated what they saw with economical lines and clear shapes. These paintings are bold, confident and exciting. 

"Lascaux" Cave Painting

Drawing from memory can also be a great exercise, you won’t get everything right, but it’ll have a logic of it’s own, and it’ll probably be more interesting than if you attempted to suffocate your drawing with a mess of accurate anatomy. Let it breathe and flow!

It can be fun to think of drawing as not the regurgitation of existing information, but an opportunity to create a new way of seeing something. The more you have to get ‘right’, the more scared you’ll be to get started. All these things get in the way of expression and creating.

"Searle's Cats" Ronald Searle

Drawing isn't surgery, there isn’t a medically agreed upon way of doing it, and no one dies if you get it wrong! If it tells its story it has served its purpose and is successful. Fear of failure can freeze you up. Take as many road blocks away as you can between you and a drawing on the page.

A failed drawing is two things: 1. An empty piece of paper because you were too scared to start. Or 2. An unclear, overworked mess because you were too scared to finish.