I can't get in touch with my artistic side.

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Do you draw everyday since you were young?

I used to draw quite a bit as a child. One thing I could say: I didn't make much of an effort.

I couldn't even color "within the lines" until I was almost in junior high, even when I made an effort to do so.

It has to do with fine motor coordination.

You have a talent for drawing. Embrace that talent. Not everybody has that kind of talent.

This isnt a magical talent that was just given to me, it took a lot of time and effort to get to where i am as an artist now. I fact my sister used to be able to draw very well because she drew all the time, but she lost interest and now her drawings are just meh. There is no such thing as talent, only persistance and interest.

If you can draw a stick figure- you can draw. If you can make a smiliey face, you can draw. Just because your artwork doesnt look like the mona lisa it doesnt make it less of art.

Note that I never said that you don't work hard. All I said is that you have a natural talent.

Talent doesnt exsist, just an eagerness to learn and improve.

My artwork did NOT always look like it does now, it was quite crude in my early years of art. If i had given up and never tried to draw i would not have gotten better at drawing.

Drawing is like a muscle. Some people have a easier time picking up a pencil but it doesnt mean that they just lack the gift, they just have more gravitation in other places like music or literature.

As a kid, i didnt draw because "it was a talent" i drew because i watched my dad draw and enjoyed cartoons and was amazed with illustrations and wanted to re-create what i saw. Not because i was good at it.

Some people have natural talent--yet don't work at it. Natural talent, in this instance, is usually useless.

Some people don't have natural talent--but they work hard and become good at something, nevertheless.

Then, of course, you have some people who have both natural talent and who work hard at it.

I have or had talent. But I don't know what to draw anymore if that makes sense. When I was younger I had ideas and sometimes it was fun drawing "anything" just because I could.

I wish someone would plain tell me WHAT to draw... Maybe then I could get into it again. I still doodle and then oddly I don't feel bad about it. Must be some kind of inner pressure telling me it has to be GOOD.

I agree a lot of talent is the passion. If you have passion you will practice. Maybe I'm not interested in drawing? Eek. I hope that is not the case.

I look at paintings I made in the past, and I cannot for my life understand how they happened.

But they did "happen"--therefore, you are capable.

I got out my crayons and started to make some lame attempts. It seriously looks like someone who has no interest and no talent. There isn't even a slight resemblance with the old paintings. Not even a resemblance how I used to draw when I was a kid before I learned stuff. Sometimes I feel like I want to have my brain scanned, because so many things about me changed. Maybe my brain shrunk or something...

Maybe you're out of practice and not inspired.

If you practiced, and you were inspired, I bet you would match, or even succeed your previous output.

I started swimming 40 years after my high school glory days.
Argh
A couple of years later I'm still not michael phelps but I'm better.

Same might be true of drawing.
Have you tried twist able colored pencils.

I did and they are fun.
Again I'm not Picasso or Rembrandt but it's fun.
We got his and hers coloring Zen tangle book.

Angst is part of being an artist.
I use mine. So did the folks that created the animated Inside Out.

How long are have you been trying for?

When I worked in the real world I my career involved artworking. My arm has spent thousands of hours with a pencil/stylus in hand and I've always found drawing extremely difficult. I still do.

I love art, but I have never had any of the coordination that some of the more talented people would show; I always chalked it down to a 'shaky hand', now I've been referred and discovered a little about AS, I will be curious to see if it's dyspraxia.



The thing is, this is kinda right. There can be a remarkable difference in drawing quality depending on where your focus is. I find if I'm trying to be consciously analytical (like you), I can do it, but it wears me down very quickly, my attention usually gets diverted after about 20-30 mins and everything gets too sloppy to keep drawing.

I have to have the motivation, and be loosened out consciously to draw. It's almost like a trance-like state.

Try a warm-up, either in total silence (no little squeaking plugs, or computer fans), or unintrusive music in headphones to do this.

This is going to sound a bit woo, but stay with me. Close your eyes and try to visualise anything for a while while you listen to the music. Examine it's details, then try to look at it's overall outline, and trace it in your head. Do this a few times and then start to shift to visualising what you want to draw. Do it's outline too. My wife tells me I can be doing this for up to 45 minutes on the slowest days. But when I open my eyes I usually find that I'm a bit dreamy, and can feel-out what I want to draw from then on.

Somedays even that doesn't work, and if I have to draw it has to be 'drawing by correction', to do this, don't correct as you go, instead, just draw badly, and then repair it.

Three things that I felt had the biggest impact on improving my drawing ability:

Practicing shapes in perspective. Drawing cubes, rectangles, adding together and making simple buildings, complexity of your buildings will increase with time; For organic shapes practice (again, in perspective) circles and spheres, cylinders, bulging cylinders, and 'flopping matresses' (imagine a matress standing on it's upright on its end and just starting to sag down). Draw these both in simple wireframes, and shaded. This practice will prepare you to draw the human body from various angles. Do this long enough and you'll start to find you can't help put the shapes together, you'll start to see the world as being constructed as parts from your shape-toolkit.

Realise the human body as shapes from your toolkit - Look at how to draw posture/poses online, there's plenty of good resources out there, google elfwood figure drawing as a nice easy starting point. The face needs to be addressed separately (once you know the rules they're actually pretty straightforward to scaffold) - but seek out both tutorials, and if you can get artbooks, that show scaffold sketches by your favourite artists, this will help your understanding greatly. You'll know you have it when you're efortlessly sketching people from the telly out of circles, cylinders and floppy-matresses.

Finally, I found that working as a production artist for a while greatly increased my ability to draw freely. I spent a significant amount of time, pathing and isolating images using a wacom tablet - the constant practice tracing outlines trained my arm with new movements and curves that I was far more confident to draw from scratch.

Best of luck with your drawing, hope you keep at it!

I share your frustration with that. Composers and musicians study and practice for many years to overcome that. Brain scans show that when they listen to music, their left hemisphere is active, while the right hemisphere is active in a non-musician. You have to get the other hemisphere up and running -- counting, recognizing intervals, etc. Or there's the perfect pitch route -- it can be acquired, but it takes a year of practice.