2020 In Sketches

I am a bit late in posting this, but I thought it would be a good idea to put all my sketches in one place and show you the progress one can make by learning in tiny increments.

When I started the Da Vinci course in July 2019, we were required to do two things: 1) Draw for fifteen minutes everyday 2) Post your drawing on social media every day.

Drawing every day builds muscles, and posting every day gives you deadlines.

Noting gets done without the deadlines. So, at the end of the day, I had to make sure I had something to post on Instagram. It had a side-benefit. My classmates started leaving comments on it. That encouraged me to do my homework and make sure I don’t miss a day.

I was building a habit to draw every day.

I started with drawing circles, and for one week, I drew a page full of circles every day. Big circles, small circles, clockwise circles, anticlockwise circles, fast circles, slow circles.

This was intentional. Drawing different kind of circles uses different muscles which help avoid fatigue and leads to better control.

Besides, if you learn to draw circles, not the perfect circles, but circly-circle (ones with concentric rings that you keep on drawing until it is right), you can draw anything.

From circles, we moved on to draw animals – pig, hippopotamus, cat, dog, teddy bear – all from circles.

Our next move was to learn how to draw Peanuts characters. Snoopy, Charlie Brwon, Lucy, Sally and Linus.

Then came Kung Fu Panda. He gave me a lot of trouble. It took me a lot of time to get his expressions right.

By the end of the year, we were creating a character of our own. That is when Ms. Jolly appears, almost fully formed. It took me a little while to learn to draw her curly hair but apart from that, she was there with her unique personality.

Altogether I drew and posted 250 sketches of Ms. Jolly in 2020, without counting the practice one. This is a great feat for someone who couldn’t draw a circle twelve months ago. I have put aside 20 sketches for the cartoon book I intend to publish in 2021.

But I am most proud of my Da Vinci diaries where I hand wrote all the notes during the course.

My only regret is that I started the diary halfway through the course. I intend to finish the earlier lessons this year. It will be a great way to revise the lessons.

Towards the end of 2020, I started drawing flowers. See the improvement in just 12 days.

One of the analogies our drawing teacher gave us earlier in the course was – there are two ways to eat a cake. You can eat it in tiny pieces or gobble the whole thing down. Most of us would like to gobble, whether it is cake or learning. But like cake, learning needs to be tackled in small portions.

Fifteen to thirty minutes of drawing everyday proves that.