As drawing and painting find a surge of popularity through TV shows and gallery teach-ins, Amelia Hill reports on the latest attempt to bring art to the masses while Euan Ferguson joins a class to unleash his previously hidden talent

Can't draw? Start on an illustration of a cat and it ends up looking like an elephant? Help is at hand. And the experts say they can teach anyone to be a competent artist in just two hours.

The fifth annual Big Draw event, which is launched next Sunday, will host a month of art activities in more than 1,000 galleries, museums and village halls across the country for an anticipated 3,500 amateurs, with help from professional artists including Quentin Blake, Gerald Scarfe and Posy Simmonds.

Sarah Simblet, an artist and author who will teach the two-hour Big Draw classes, believes the public's attitude towards art has changed. 'The tide has turned away from the modern, installation-type art and now drawing is being rediscovered,' she said. 'People are beginning to realise that you don't have to be born with natural talent, but that it can be achieved through hard work. It is never too late to start.' The Big Draw comes hot on the heels of the BBC2 show Art School, which tracked five celebrities including John Humphrys, Ulrika Jonsson and Clarissa Dickson-Wright as they struggled to become exhibiting artists in a fortnight.

BBC2 is to start screening a major new four-part documentary, The Secret Of Drawing, within weeks, followed soon afterwards by Life Class, a one-hour documentary on BBC3 that tracks the process of six people as Simblet teaches them how to draw in six days.

Sue Grayson Ford, founder of the Serpentine Gallery and director of the Campaign for Drawing, believes there is an artistic crisis. 'We are losing the confidence to look, to see and to draw. It really is that simple - and that's serious,' she said, arging that drawing, painting and other artistic pursuits are widely seen as beyond the abilities of most people. Sir Christopher Frayling, rector of the Royal College of Art and chair of Arts Council England, agrees. 'People are scared of words like "art",' he said. 'The Big Draw demystifies it, turns it into something that can be accessed by all. The patron of the Big Draw, cartoonist Quentin Blake, said: 'We live under a bombardment of manufactured images, and in the face of that we need to draw as a way of discovering the reality of the world about us.'

Amelia Hill

Drawing can't be all that difficult, surely?

It was probably when Sarah suggested that I try drawing with my left hand that I realised I was in even deeper, sweatier trouble than I had thought, and my heart had already been deep in my old boots for many minutes.

She meant it in a most kindly fashion, of course - 'Sometimes it just frees you, lets you get started by finding the line, even though it's not your natural hand.' But to me, after 10 terrifying minutes of struggle to represent the outline of a human body with a piece of charcoal, it just sounded like the world sniggering at me. Left hand, Sarah? Why don't I just try it with my left elbow, or my left buttock? If you look at the mess on the cartridge paper in front of us, I think you'll find it's clear I can't tell the difference ...

It is, honestly, quite extraordinarily hard at the beginning. Frankly, that annoyed me. I like being able to do things, learn them quickly. I can read music, parse sentences. I once, for four minutes, managed to understand quantum theory. Drawing was, surely, a cakewalk.

The moment I realised I had been very, very wrong came about three minutes after settling myself in front of the easel. I looked intently at the life model before me, worked out what I thought was the most striking line about her pose, and drew it, quickly, on the paper. Then another line, the shoulders. A bit more fiddling and some clever sideways roughing with the charcoal and I stood back and looked, and realised I had become not an artist but a destroyer: of worlds, hope, beauty.

Why had I turned this gorgeous woman in front of me into a Flanimal, a gargoyle? I began to sweat and it all got an awful lot worse, and then Sarah suggested that I try with my left hand.

The problem with it is, of course, the blankness, the white of the paper, the sense that you could create anything, brilliantly or woefully. Much easier to be a sculptor: surely all you need to do to sculpt an elephant is get a huge block of marble and then chip away all the bits that don't look like an elephant.

Sarah persevered, with humour and the occasional patronising coo of faux-admiration: and I went outside for a desperate fag-break and came back and tried again and something astonishing happened. Our lovely model had re-posed, turned around and given me a different view of her backside, and suddenly there was a line I could see, and (vaguely) reproduce. Another line followed, and Sarah chatted away about it all - a lot of quite fascinating stuff about the composers and astronomers and mathematicians who down history have used drawing simply to see their own thoughts, then take the result and work it into their own discipline - and, suddenly, my mind elsewhere and my hand simply feeling free, I found I had drawn half a dozen lines which weren't quite as rumbustiously out of proportion as before.

I was left with a smudgy, scratchy, quite vaultingly bad drawing, and a terror that the model, once dressed, would ask to see it and then smack me heavily around the face: but on the cartridge paper before me she looked marginally less like an egg on stilts

I'm not saying Dr Sarah Simblet is necessarily a genius, even though I may think it. She didn't make me pencil out proportions or all that stuff: she simply asked me to go for it, again and again, and after two hours there was, admittedly, a change, in that the result was simply bad rather than actionable.

It also made me appreciate art in a way I have never done before. On Friday, I lost myself for about 20 minutes looking at a little line-drawing in the Independent, a fast sketch beside Tracey Emin's column which she had done of Kate Moss. Every little line, perfect. I gazed, and I was suffused with envy and take back everything I have ever said about Brit Art.

Euan Ferguson