At some point when I was a kid, I decided I couldn’t draw. I put pen to paper, examined my work, and found it lacking. Well, no big deal. I’m good at other things, so why not leave the art to “artistic” people?

Since that fateful decision, I have steadfastly avoided anything remotely related to art: drawing, design, everything. And all of it, based on the assumption that I don’t have what it takes.

As I get older, I’ve learned and done many things I once thought impossible. If you told the 15 year old me, at a scrawny 139 lbs, that someday I would throw up a 355 lb deadlift, I would have laughed you out of the room. But I did it last year. And experiences like that make me wonder - what else am I missing out on?

Recently, I’ve been wondering - why did I assume so quickly that I have no aptitude for anything “art”? What makes a person “artistic”?

I started Googling, and what I found was encouraging. Nobody is born knowing how to draw - the greats were as bad as your average Joe before spending thousands of hours perfecting technique. Innate ability plays into it (like anything), but drawing is mostly learned. It’s not something you can or can’t do, and as I researched, I read one thing over and over:

People who can’t draw spend most of their time looking at the paper .

draw spend most of their time looking at the . People who can draw spend most of their time looking at the subject.

Armed with this knowledge, and some testimonies from other people who learned to draw as adults, I ordered this book. I agree with the negative reviews, which point out that the right brain / left brain pseudo-science is mostly nonsense and there’s a ton of pop psychology that, when not incorrect, is irrelevant. The psychology:exercise ratio is way out of whack in this book.

However, it does one thing really well - it takes people who can not draw and teaches them how to look at objects and put them down on paper. The critical part of this process is drawing upside down. Once you succeed at drawing something upside down the first time, you never look back.

I have only done a handful of exercises. I drew a Picasso reproduction upside down and was amazed at how well it turned out. Next, I reproduced a drawing of a knight on a horse:

I was so surprised at how good the knight looked that I decided to dive in the deep end and take a shot at drawing my own hand. I amped up the difficulty a bit, choosing a challenging position with weird lighting (camera flash directly to the palm, then I drew from the digital picture). Here’s what I came up with:

I went from no ability whatsoever, to doing this in around 15 hours of effort. Seriously.

As I get older, I am constantly amazed at our capacity to learn anything we want. It seems like as people, we make generalizations about ourselves to feel better about what we can and can’t do. You’re a writer who doesn’t understand music, an artist who can’t grok fractions, a sales guy who doesn’t “get” computers. You’re too old to do this, or too young to do that. It’s all nonsense. You can do whatever you want. As long as you find the right resources and don’t take no for an answer, no one’s stopping you but you.