Learning to draw is building a tunnel
Keep going! You will break through.
Almost every day, I ride my bike through a hole in a hill; the Karori tunnel. It connects the suburb I live in with the rest of the city of Wellington. Tunnels can help you draw too.
I don’t think about how it got there. Occasionally, I notice the “AD 1900” sign above the entrance that shows just how long this tunnel has been making moving easy.
Biking from home to work is only easy because of what these guys did more than a century ago. Without them, I’d be scaling a steep hill every day. With the tunnel, it’s effortless.
A drawing tunnel
This is a bit like drawing. Seemingly effortless outputs are only possible when travelling through a tunnel. When you see someone using a tunnel, you don’t think about how it was built. You might not ever realise they’re in a tunnel!
Before the tunnel, trips over the hill would have been arduous and treacherous. My early drawings weren’t dangerous, but they were a bit scary to me. My marks were nervous and tentative. Slow and uncertain.
Over time, picture by picture, I built a tunnel. You can build one too. Each drawing refines it a little more. I don’t know when (or if) it’s finished, but when you’re doing Your Thing, you’re building a tunnel. You can’t rely on waistcoat-clad workmen from a hundred years ago.
The key to building your tunnel is quantity of work
Making lots of small, fast drawings of the same thing can teach you a lot. Especially if you do it over a short period. Last weekend I taught a people drawing workshop.
At the start of the first day, I told them I wanted each of them to draw at least 50 people in the next two days. Their faces showed disbelief and shock, but some of them cracked 50 on the first day, and by the end of the weekend, a few had drawn more than 100.
All of them said the volume of drawings made a big difference to their confidence and ability; the quantity of work helped build the tunnel.
Tunnels are “grind and breakthrough”
It doesn’t happen all at once. When building a tunnel the progress isn’t obvious. Until the tunnel breaks through, it’s just a dent. It’s the same with learning to draw.
It isn’t easy, but good things happen when you keep going.
When you’re building your drawing tunnel there will be times when a lot of effort yields little gain. But suddenly, a huge boulder comes out, clearing a good chunk of earth in one go.
In drawing, breakthroughs come from little ideas. The little ideas come from lots of drawing. You never know when you’re about to extract a boulder, so keep on drawing.
Starting a new tunnel?
My people drawing workshop ended with drawing some musician friends as they played for us. I experimented with coloured lines. I’ve done this with buildings before but using colour to try and capture movement is different. I don’t know where this is going or what breakthroughs might come, but I think this might be the start of a new tunnel.
Next week, I’ll show you what it was like before I had a tunnel. I’ll share about the very first time I ever drew a building on the street, back in 2014, and I’ll redraw it now, over a decade (and hundreds of drawings) later. Subscribe to get it in your inbox next week.
PS: Did anyone try my lentil soup recipe from last week’s post?
Fun things to click on:
🧑🤝🧑 I lifted the paywall on these tips on drawing people. Paid subscribers can watch this replay of the people drawing exercise I ran for sketchbook club.
🌍 I leave for my European drawing trip in five weeks! I am really excited. The first stop is Berlin, before the Urban Sketchers Symposium in Poznan. If you’ll be in Berlin in mid-August and would like to draw together, get in touch!
💻 As a warm-up to that trip, I’m running a series of free online drawing sessions called Lines, shapes. and madness with my friend (and fellow USk Symposium instructor) Uma Kelkar starting Saturday, July 19
🌳There is just one spot left on the sketchbook retreat I’m teaching with my dad at Blackfern Lodge in the North Island in late November/early December. Book now!
✏️ Sketchbook Club for paid subscribers is on the last Sunday of every month. You’ll get access to all the past recordings and the full archive (40+ posts).
📙 The tunnel drawing is from my One Day project, where I rode my bike and drew all day. 20 drawings and the full story of the day are collected in a zine. There are still a few copies in my Etsy shop.
📖 In case you’re curious, here’s some extra reading about the Karori tunnel
📷 Tunnel photos credits:
Unidentified workers near the shell of the Karori Tunnel under construction. Spiers, Mrs K :Photographs. Ref: 1/2-038256-F. Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand. /records/22749641
Unidentified group, Karori Tunnel, Wellington. Field, William Hughes, 1861-1944 :Assorted photographic prints and negatives. Ref: 1/2-115936-F. Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand. /records/23050399
I DID make your wonderful lentil stew! It was a perfect yummy easy meal to make on a day where we needed a little comfort food. This is definitely one of my new go-to dinner recipes! Also, my husband was every so amused by the sketched recipe :-)
What a great analogy! It can be so hard to appreciate all the work, say an artist, put into developing their craft. Nobody was born an incredible artist or athlete or whatever, they dug their tunnel!