drawanyway.com

But there was also a massive crisis of confidence – while my classmates were churning out perfect still-life compositions in oils, I was becoming overwhelmed by the sheer body of fantastic art already out there. Did I want to be a Warhol or a Vermeer? Was there room to be both? Could I ever even get to the level of their worst scrawls? Was there even any point when both of those people had already achieved what they had? And so on. I’ll spare you the details.

As I said, I failed. I went off to university to study something else, drawing occasionally for the amusement of my friends. But I didn’t pursue it any further.

Fifteen years later, I heard about some local Saturday art classes at the local university, through a casual job I’d been doing since student days: modelling for life classes (I might add that I might not have been drawing much during this time, but I certainly had access to a lot of advice from fantastic art teachers as I sat, naked and still, fighting off the pins and needles). I enrolled on a couple.

One day, the teacher approached me to ask if I’d ever considered taking an MA in Illustration. Rather embarrassingly, I burst into tears. I suppose it was the culmination of all of those years thinking I couldn’t draw, suddenly being negated.

So anyway, I still haven’t got an A’ Level in Art, but I do have an MA in Illustration.

What’s all this ‘can’t draw’ business?
Over the years, I’ve come across a lot of people who are absolutely adamant that drawing is either something you can do or you can’t. I know it’s easy for me to say, but I don’t subscribe to that. These days I’m a mother and I’ve lost count of how many other parents have said to me they’d love to be able to draw for their child.

A two-year old has got to be the least critical human being there is: they’re happy if you scribble on the paper and tell them it’s a Teletubby, so I think the parent’s confidence has to be really low if they can’t even do that.

I may be no great artist myself but I have a few tricks up my sleeve. They’re nothing to do with talent, they are pure technique, practice and confidence. And I’m happy to share.

OK, so what about ‘no time to draw’?
Well, that’s the other category of person I come across - a category in which I have to include myself. These are people who used to draw quite regularly, but life got in the way. I work full time and I look after my daughter the rest of the time. That leaves, oh, let me see… zero minutes for anything else. So I have set this site up partly for myself, and partly for people like me, in an effort to bring the fun/discipline/joy (delete as applicable) of art back into our daily schedules, if only for a few minutes a day.

So, in short, I’m no-one special. And why am I telling you how to draw? Because I think you can.

(Thanks for reading this far! For someone who has so little time, I can’t half go on..)

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