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064: Drawing advice for beginners

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064: Drawing advice for beginners

The good one

Adam Ming
Nov 12, 2022
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064: Drawing advice for beginners

adamming.substack.com

☕️ This post is one of the better receive according to ‘stats’, so I’ve added a little bit extra to the text and added an illustration. Leave a comment or drop an email if you would like any specific advice …for beginners.

Hearing something said in a different way, can help us understand something we’ve always heard.

One example is this advice on drawing I heard when I was a kid dreaming of being a comics artist. I can’t remember who said it, but it was a comic artist

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And they said: You need to make a lot of bad drawings before you can make good drawings. Good drawings are in you, but they are behind a lot of bad drawings, so to get to the good drawings you need to let out all the bad drawings.

They also mentioned something about a water hose, like the good drawings were behind the bad drawings in a water hose. And we need to flush out the bad drawings.

That really gave me an urgency to ‘let out’ a lot of drawings, eager to see if the next one would be the good one!

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Might have been Todd McFarlane

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064: Drawing advice for beginners

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Mark Dykeman
Writes How About This
Nov 12, 2022Liked by Adam Ming

The advice about drawing also applies to writing - lots of bad writing to get to the good stuff.

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Sophie Furman
Jan 22Liked by Adam Ming

Awesome post and analogy!! :) Thank you so much for this lovely post. My question would be (I think this was covered over some newsletter posts, but I just thought more would be amazing too :)) how to keep a sketchbook practice. I often get so perfectionist-y and tend to try to draw only for projects that are for commissions or portfolio. How much of the week should be spent drawing just for fun, if possible, and how do you overcome fear of bad drawings?? :) :)

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