Think back to your maths lessons at school, you weren’t just handed a page of complicated calculations and expected to know how to do them, were you?
Your teacher explained the methods. You learned how to add, subtract, multiply and divide. Later, you learned about fractions, angles, ratios and geometry.
You practised, made mistakes, had things explained again and gradually got better.
Now think back to your art lessons.
Were you actually taught HOW to draw?
Or were you given a pencil, some paper, perhaps an apple or a vase to copy, and told to get on with it?
And if your drawing didn’t look particularly good, what did you conclude?
“I’m just not artistic.”
It’s a conclusion that so many people carry with them for the rest of their lives.
But I’ve been thinking about something that might completely change the way you see drawing.
Drawing is actually a form of mathematics!
I know that might sound a bit strange, but bear with me.
When you draw something accurately, what are you actually doing?
You’re working out where things go, how big they should be and how they relate to everything else.
Think about drawing a face.
You need to work out how far apart the eyes are, how wide the nose is compared with the mouth, how long the face is in relation to its width, and what angle the jawline follows.
That’s measurement, proportion, ratios and angles.
That’s maths!
You’re just doing most of it with your eyes rather than with numbers and a calculator.
And I think this explains something really important about why so many people struggle to draw.
Nobody gave you a ruler for your brain!
Imagine I asked you to draw a line exactly 2cm / 1 inch long.
You’d probably get reasonably close.
But what if I asked you to draw a line exactly 17cm / 7 inches long?
Without a ruler?
That’s much harder.
Now imagine trying to judge dozens of different distances and angles across a whole sheet of paper.
That’s what you’re asking your brain to do when you draw freehand.
And unless you’ve developed the ability to judge those distances accurately, things are inevitably going to end up in the wrong places.
An eye might be slightly too high. A bird’s body might be too long. A dog’s ears might be too far apart.
You can see something isn’t quite right, but you can’t work out why.
The problem isn’t necessarily that you can’t draw. It’s that you haven’t yet learned how to measure accurately with your eyes.
And just like other measuring skills, that’s something you can improve with practice.
Geometry is hiding in everything you draw
Here’s another interesting connection.
Remember learning about circles, triangles, rectangles and ovals?
Those simple shapes are incredibly useful when you’re learning to draw.
Take a bird, for example.
You could look at the whole bird and think, “I’ve no idea how to draw that!”
Or you could start looking for the shapes within it.
An oval for the body. A circle for the head. A triangle for the beak. Perhaps a long rectangle for the tail.
Suddenly, you’ve got a starting point.
You’re not trying to draw a complicated bird anymore. You’re arranging simple shapes and checking how they relate to one another.
Once those shapes are in the right places, you can gradually refine them.
And that’s another form of mathematical thinking.
You’re using geometry and spatial relationships to construct something more complicated from simpler parts.
It’s a method you can learn, rather than a talent you have to be born with.
Why drawing grids make so much sense
If you’ve ever used a grid to help you draw, you might have wondered whether it’s cheating.
It’s not.
In fact, I think it’s a rather clever solution to a measuring problem.
A grid divides a large space into smaller, more manageable sections.
Instead of trying to judge where something belongs across 20 centimetres of blank paper, you might only need to judge its position within a 2cm / 1 inch square.
And which do you think is easier to estimate accurately?
Exactly!
It’s the same principle as breaking a complicated maths problem into smaller steps.
You’re reducing the difficulty so you can concentrate on one manageable part at a time.
I’ve developed my own custom grid method that uses just a few carefully placed guidelines to help with those measurements.
I call these techniques drawing stabilisers.
They’re there to support you while you’re learning, just like stabilisers on a bicycle.
And as your ability to measure with your eyes improves, you can gradually rely on them less.
Can anyone learn to draw, or is it natural talent?
This is the question I keep coming back to.
If a child struggles with multiplication, we don’t usually decide they were born without mathematical talent and should never try again.
We explain the method differently. We give them more practice. We help them understand what they’re doing.
Of course, some people find maths easier than others, just as some people find drawing easier.
But we generally accept that mathematical skills can be taught.
Yet when it comes to drawing, there’s still this widespread belief that you either have natural artistic talent or you don’t.
And I wonder how many people stopped drawing because they believed that.
How many adults still say, “I can’t draw,” because of something that happened in an art lesson when they were ten?
Interestingly, even Ofsted’s research into art education recognises the importance of explicitly teaching drawing skills.
Drawing isn’t something we should simply be expected to work out for ourselves. There are methods to learn, just as there are in maths.
Perhaps when you were a children you weren’t bad at drawing at all.
Perhaps nobody taught you the methods you needed to learn
Drawing involves more than maths, of course
I’m not suggesting that being good at maths automatically makes you a brilliant artist!
There’s much more to drawing and art than accurate proportions.
There’s expression, imagination, observation, creativity and the choices we make about what to include or leave out.
And not every drawing needs to be perfectly accurate. Sometimes distortion and exaggeration are exactly what makes a piece of art interesting.
But when your goal is to draw something realistically, understanding measurement, proportion, angles and shapes can make an enormous difference.
And the wonderful thing is that you don’t need to be good at school maths to use these techniques.
You don’t need to calculate complicated equations or remember your times tables.
You simply need to learn what to look for and how to compare what you see.
Learning the methods changes everything
When I was teaching myself to draw, I gradually realised that so many of my difficulties came down to inaccurate measuring.
I didn’t have a ruler in my head!
Once I understood that, I could start finding ways to make drawing easier.
And it’s one of the reasons I’m so passionate about teaching drawing skills today.
I don’t believe it’s helpful to tell someone to “just draw what you see” if nobody has explained HOW to do that.
I want people to understand the methods artists use.
How to compare distances. How to check proportions. How to recognise shapes. How to use guidelines and grids to make complicated subjects manageable.
Being able to draw is one thing. Knowing HOW drawing works is what helps you learn to do it.
And if you’re an adult who hasn’t picked up a pencil for years because you decided at school that you couldn’t draw, I’d really like you to reconsider that.
You weren’t necessarily lacking talent. You may simply never have been shown the techniques that would have helped you succeed.
So the next time you hear someone say, “I can’t draw. I was never any good at art at school,” perhaps ask them a different question.
Were you actually taught how to draw?
Because if you weren’t, how could you possibly know what you’re capable of? Perhaps it’s time we stopped treating drawing as a mysterious natural gift and started teaching it as a skill.
Just like maths.
What if you could learn to draw too?
That’s exactly why I created my six-week Learn to Draw course.
I don’t expect you to arrive knowing how to draw, and I certainly don’t expect you to have natural artistic talent!
Instead, I’ll teach you the real methods artists use. How to see shapes, judge proportions, measure with your eyes and use simple techniques that make even complicated subjects easier to draw.
Not just what to draw, but HOW to draw.
Because being able to draw is one thing. Knowing how to teach someone else is another.
If you’ve always wanted to learn to draw but never believed you could, perhaps it’s time to give yourself a chance.
Find out about my six-week drawing course
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I teach drawing and soft pastel skills in my Art Club online here