I had an interesting experience last night.... It was an NLP evening about cartoon drawing, and the use of cartoons in presentations.
Now I am definitely amongst those who hated art at school, cannot draw, and have never been able to draw. I am not kidding... I once wanted to make a tee-shirt with an apple logo on it (a reference to Isaac Newton, if you must know, not the Beatles company or the computer maker) and I had to go and ask an arty friend how to draw an apple. I had tried just drawing a circle, and it didn't look right.
I can remember at school being sent out of art lessons because the art teacher couldn't believe that I wasn't deliberately doing it that badly.
So my expectations of being able to draw cartoons were exceptionally low.
The method adopted by the presenter was to get us to start by just drawing a series of marks in a fixed way, without regard to what they might represent. We had to practice them several times, making them in a fixed order. "Just make these marks and don't worry about how it looks." The marks, of course, were the mouth, nose, eyes, ear, and so on, of a cartoon face. Having done this a few times, we then tried copying a few variations of different eyes, noses, hair, and so on.
The effect of this was entirely to remove any aspect of having to LOOK at something and then decide HOW to draw it. I found it not too difficult to make some cartoon faces, in a sort of mechanical way, just by following the process. And it was quite entertaining.
My first ever attempt. The next thing that happened was that I had a sort of negative "but this isn't drawing" reaction. "I'm just making fixed movements. I might as well be drawing round a plastic stencil."
I got past this. Okay, it's not "art". I'm circumventing the challenge of being able to look at something real and draw it. What's left, however, is still interesting, enjoyable for me, and potentially useful. It's not an entirely mechanical process, because I can experiment with different shapes or positions of the various marks that I make and see how it affects the result, what different expressions I can generate. Which is sometimes quite surprising. I can see that, with more practice, I could soon learn to generate variations of my own.
I said "potentially useful". . . the presenter's main application for this is drawing cartoons while presenting some subject,as a way of making things memorable and interesting for the audience. I can believe that works.
The next thing that happened, though, was what convinced me there was something in this. I'd just spent half an hour making variations on a cartoon face, trying to represent male, female, happy, sad, surprised, young, old, and so on. Then we had a tea break, and I went down to the bar... and found that I was looking at people's faces slightly differently, paying more attention to their features. Interesting.
I'm wondering now if there's an analogy here with music, where what he did is like getting us to learn an instrument by playing a simple piece that's written down for us, whereas what I was asked to do in school (i.e. draw something I can see) is like asking a beginner who can't play an instrument to compose a piece and learn to play the instrument at the same time.
