I was 34 years old and I had never picked up a pencil to sketch anything in my life.
Not seriously, anyway. I'd doodle the odd thing here and there like most people do, but actual drawing? Painting? That was something other people did. People who were born with it. People who had been doing it since they were kids and just had it in them. I was not one of those people — or so I thought.
What I did have was this quiet fascination that had followed me for years. I'd stop scrolling whenever I came across an artist's work online. I'd watch videos of painters for way longer than I should have. There was something about the way a skilled artist could take a blank surface and turn it into something that felt alive — a face with real emotion, a landscape with actual depth, a figure that looked like it could step off the page — that I genuinely couldn't understand. How do they see that? How do they do that?
In 2018 I decided to stop watching and start trying.
This is the story of what happened next. I'm writing it because I made a lot of mistakes, wasted a lot of time, and learned a lot of hard lessons — and if I can save even one person from going through the same detours, it's worth putting down.
The Mistake I Made First
The moment I decided to learn to draw, I did what most beginners do: I went straight to the hardest thing possible.
I wanted to draw people. Figures. Faces. The kind of expressive, dynamic human forms I'd seen in the work that had inspired me. So naturally, I thought the logical place to start was anatomy. I bought books on figure drawing. I studied how the skull sits on the neck, how the torso connects to the hips, how legs and arms are proportioned. I drew circles and cylinders trying to construct bodies from geometric shapes.
It did not go well.
The learning curve was brutal. My figures looked stiff and lifeless. My faces looked like they belonged on a police sketch. I was putting in the hours but the results weren't reflecting the effort. I kept thinking I just needed to study more anatomy, learn more rules, memorise more proportions. More information would surely fix it.
It didn't. Because the problem wasn't what I knew. The problem was how I was seeing.
The Book That Changed Everything
At some point during this frustrating period I came across a book that I now recommend to every single person who tells me they want to learn to draw.
Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain by Betty Edwards.
I cannot overstate how much this book changed the way I approached art. It didn't teach me new techniques or more anatomy. It did something far more fundamental — it completely rewired the way I looked at the world.
The central idea of the book is this: most adults can't draw not because they lack talent or skill, but because they've learned to think about what they're seeing rather than actually see it. When you look at a face, your brain immediately labels everything — "nose," "eye," "mouth" — and when you try to draw it, you draw the symbol of those things that you've carried in your head since you were a child. You draw what you think a nose looks like, not what the nose in front of you actually looks like.
Artists see differently. They don't see a nose — they see a collection of shapes, shadows, angles, and edges. They see the negative space around forms as clearly as the forms themselves. They see light and dark as abstract shapes rather than as objects with names.
The book puts you through exercises specifically designed to shut off that left-brain labelling habit and force you to see like an artist. One famous exercise has you draw a face upside down — so your brain can't recognise it as a face and just has to deal with the shapes and lines it actually sees. The results most people get on their very first try, without any training, are remarkable.
I did those exercises and something shifted. Not gradually — it felt almost sudden. I started to actually see my subjects rather than draw what I thought they should look like. A tree wasn't a tree anymore — it was a collection of shapes, edges, light and shadow. A face wasn't a face — it was planes and angles and negative space. My drawings improved more in a few weeks than they had in the months before. Not because I had suddenly developed talent. Because I had finally started seeing.
If you take nothing else from this post, take this: buy that book. Read it properly. Do the exercises. It will save you months — maybe years.
A Journey Through Every Medium I Could Find
With my new way of seeing the world, something else happened that I didn't expect. Art started pulling me in directions I never planned to go. I thought I'd find my thing — one medium, one style — and just get better at it over time. Instead what followed was years of wandering through different materials, each one teaching me something the last one couldn't.
It started with watercolour. Landscape painting became my obsession almost immediately. I loved the way you could push warm light against cool shadows, the way diluting a wash just slightly could make a distant mountain feel miles away. I learned about value and saturation and how the depth of a landscape isn't really about drawing every detail — it's about understanding how colour and tone create the illusion of space. Watercolour was a beautiful teacher. But it had one limitation I kept running into: no matter how I layered the washes, the colours felt thin. I wanted richness. I wanted saturation. I wanted to feel the paint.
So I moved to oil.
Walking into oil painting felt like walking into a different world. The colours were full and deep and mixable in ways that felt almost unlimited. Picking up a palette knife and watching two colours transform into something completely unexpected on the palette — that was genuinely thrilling. And painting landscapes in oil had a quality that watercolour couldn't match: weight. The paintings felt substantial. Real. I loved it so much that I signed up for oil painting classes, and I'm glad I did. I'm mostly self-taught but those classes gave me things I couldn't get from books or videos alone — not just techniques, but people. Sitting in a room with other painters, watching how someone else solves a problem, sharing what's working and what isn't — there's a kind of learning that only happens in that environment. If you ever get the chance to join a class or a local painting group, take it.
The problem with oil was time. It dries slowly — a full day between layers at minimum. And the setup, the cleanup, the solvents, the waiting — it started to feel like a production every single time I wanted to paint. The friction was real and it made me paint less. I needed something simpler.
Pastels found me at the right moment. You pick up the stick and draw directly onto the surface — no mixing, no waiting, no cleanup. The pigment is rich and the colours are intense straight out of the box. At first the fact that pastels don't mix well felt like a limitation. You choose a colour and you commit to it. But I slowly realised that limitation was actually the best thing about them. When you can't endlessly adjust and refine the colour, you stop obsessing over details. You think about the whole composition. You think about values. You make a decision and you move on. Pastels forced a kind of confidence into my work that I didn't know I needed.
But I missed mixing. I missed the feeling of building a colour from scratch and I missed the versatility that came with it. That's what led me to acrylics — and the moment I started using them I understood immediately why so many artists love them. Fast drying like watercolour. Rich saturated colours like oil. I could finish a layer and paint over it within the hour, which meant a painting session actually felt productive. The joy of mixing was back, without the days of waiting. Acrylics fit into my life in a way that oil never quite did.
And then life got busier. Work, responsibilities, a full schedule — the long painting sessions became harder to find. I still loved acrylics and watercolour but I needed something I could do every single day without any setup at all. Something I could carry with me.
That's what led me to ink. I bought a small notebook and a pen and started drawing whatever was in front of me — a coffee cup on the table, a building across the street, a person sitting at a café. No preparation, no cleanup, no excuses not to do it. Just looking and drawing. Ink is unforgiving — there's no erasing, no correcting, just committing to every line — and that turned out to be exactly what I needed. It made me more decisive. More present. More honest with what I was actually seeing.
I still pick up acrylics and watercolour when I have the time and the mood. But ink is what keeps me connected to drawing every single day.
What I've Learned — The Honest List
After years of painting and sketching across more media than I expected, here's what I'd tell my 34-year-old self:
Stop trying to make a masterpiece. For years I'd buy expensive canvas and quality materials for the painting I really wanted to be proud of. It almost never worked. The pressure of wanting it to be good removed all the freedom from my hand and turned every brushstroke into something to judge. My best work has always come when I didn't care about the outcome — when I was just exploring. Buy cheap materials. Paint freely. Save the expensive canvas for when a painting actually earns it.
Read Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain by Betty Edwards. I've already said this but I'll say it again. It will change the way you see, and that changes everything.
Don't start with anatomy. Learning specific techniques or body parts in isolation will slow you down more than it helps. What makes art look alive is learning to see your subject honestly and reflect what you actually observe — not what you think it should look like.
Practice gesture drawing with timed reference images. Set a timer, draw a pose in 30 or 60 seconds, move to the next one. Do this regularly and your figures will start to have real weight and movement. The time limit is the point — it stops you from overthinking and forces you to capture what matters.
Learn colour theory. Understanding how colours relate to each other, how mixing works, how warm and cool interact in the same scene — this will transform your painting. You don't need to study it academically, just stay curious about it as you work.
Study light. How it hits a surface, how it bounces into shadows, how it creates warmth and coolness at the same time. Light is what makes a painting feel real.
Let your interests lead you. Don't feel like you have to pick one medium and stay there forever. Some years it will be one thing, some years another. Each path teaches you something that feeds back into everything else you do. Just be warned — if you follow your curiosity across different media, you will accumulate a genuinely alarming amount of art supplies.
Keep it simple and enjoy the process. The moment art becomes a test you're trying to pass, you've lost the best part of it. The act of looking, of translating what you see onto a surface, of being surprised by what comes out — that's the whole thing. Don't put pressure on yourself. Just keep going.