How I Mastered Drawing

I was continuously drawing all through my childhood. From then to adulthood, I spent a great amount of my free time drawing. I was not consciously trying to improve my drawing skills, but I just loved drawing.

I started to draw when I was really small, probably around 2 or 3 years old. I remember the place of my first pencil drawing. It was at the bottom of a white wall at the brand new apartment that our family had just moved into. Next, I drew on the Japanese sliding doors in the apartment, on the paper that covered the surface. Then I started to draw on my mother’s dictionary, various magazines and our phone books. I also drew on furniture. I especially liked crawling under desks and drawing on their undersides. What I was usually drawing was caricatures of people, animals and flowers.

After a while, my mother bought me a scribble book and a pencil and I drew in it daily. So, soon I had to ask my mother for a new one and there were many more new ones after that. I continued filling up those books all through my childhood.


Daily Drawing Practice with Manga Magazines
 

As I was growing up, I began to draw at home more with my older sister, who was very good at drawing. I also started exchanging a diary with one of my friends from school. It originally began as a normal diary but it developed into a drawing diary. We continued that for five years and my drawing really improved from that practice.

At junior high school, our art class always began with “krocky”, which is a drawing exercise where one student stands up on a chair and everyone in the class has to draw their full-length figure. Through this practice, my cartoon-style drawing was transformed into a more realistic figure drawing.

Manga magazine

During my school days, I also subscribed to Manga magazines for many years and I practiced Manga drawing daily. In fact, I was often drawing cartoons, caricatures and images in textbooks or notebooks during classes when I should have been listening to my teachers. Once I had started something, I would continue drawing through lunch and recess. When I was 12 years old, I created my own cartoon based on my school life. Also, I submitted my casual Manga drawings to a magazine a few times and all of them were printed with my name in the subscribers’ section. But I stopped sending them in because I was starting to feel a little overwhelmed when they were published and I was also embarrassed that senior students and classmates would talk to me about them at school. Comics were, and still are, very popular and influential in Japanese society and I once seriously thought of becoming a cartoonist. But my love of colour took precedence over black and white cartoons, so I started to move away from drawing cartoons.

Drawing and painting was something that I always caught the attention of people’s eyes at school. I didn’t really have anything else that I had more ability at than most others. I was the one who was always asked to create posters, coloured newspapers and school signs for school programs.


Shock at What My Art Teacher Did

However, again, I had never thought of taking further education to master my skills or look for a way to confirm how well I did compared to others. But, while I was in Ireland and New York City, I had chances to see how much I had mastered my drawing skills just practicing by myself.

One was at St. John’s Central College in Cork city in Ireland. I had enrolled following the encouragement of some local people I had met. The first few lessons of the course were in drawing. At the end of the second lesson, my drawing was shown to the whole class by our teacher as a good example of what he had hoped we would produce. Actually, I was shocked by what he did and felt a bit embarrassed because I was the only non-Irish there with 40 Irish people. After that, I stopped going to the college and focused on working in Chinese restaurants and trying to save money. Those few lessons were the only vocational fine art classes I took in my life.

The second time was at the Art Student League of New York when my friend suggested that I visit there with my portfolio. After we had looked around inside the school, he introduced me to the director of the school. I showed her the female figure drawings that I had made while I was in Ireland. My friend then asked her if I needed to improve my drawing skills but she answered confidently, “She has no problems with drawing.”

I was surprised again but I remember both experiences clearly and those are the ones that helped me position myself where I was in the art field in terms of technical skills.

I happened to improve my skills in a less common way. I think there is nothing wrong with going to college and mastering art. But I think, improving those art skills needs to be done repeatedly and preferably on a daily basis for a long period of time. So It is very easy to do so when you love what you are doing.

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