This is part 6 of the series How to Draw Better Immediately – The Definitive Guide.
The Artist’s Language is a very specific type of internal dialogue that you have with yourself about the drawing that you are creating. This inner conversation helps you to control the beautiful process of coordinating your eyes, mind and hands with each other. And whilst you do this, the part of your mind that is responsible for logical reasoning is also engaged.
Drawing and the Logical Part of your Brain
We all have a logical part to our brains. Usually, this is the part that is responsible for those negative thoughts that you tend to have about not being able to draw – or not being able to do many things in life. But when you actively engage the logical part of your brain, it immediately stops sending out those negative and unhelpful messages. Not only that: engaging the logical part of your brain helps you in terms of your technical drawing skills – because you really do need the logical mind’s help to become better artist. In other words, it’s not enough to draw purely from a vague creative state, you also need to apply some logical processes along the way.
On-demand Drawing Skills
It’s also important, given how busy life can be, to have the ability to call upon your drawing skills on demand, and not only when you’re ‘in the mood’. Taking control of your creativity and drawing skills also means that you shouldn’t have to limit your drawing experiences to those rare moments when your negative inner-voices are quiet. Keep in mind that simple mantras don’t really have the power to reverse your negative thinking – you need to take things one important step further!
So, in becoming the best artist that you can be, you need to actually embrace the logical part of your brain, rather than trying to shut it up. Trying to reverse those negative voices – the ones that are making the drawing process unnecessarily difficult – is extremely tricky and mostly unsuccessful, as you may have learnt from your own experience.
This is especially the case when the mantras you are telling yourself are things which you don’t even really believe in the first place. You can only truly believe in your ability to draw when you have seen first-hand evidence of this happening.
Becoming Better at Drawing Immediately
By using the Artist’s Language, you will be able to see first-hand that you can draw after all – and that’s all the evidence that your mind needs! My personal experience – including over 20 years of helping thousands of people to learn the art of drawing – has shown me that people become better at drawing almost immediately when embracing the logical and reasoning part of their brains. This is an exciting idea, even a revolutionary one. It means that you have the capacity to control your drawing experience to a far greater degree than you probably thought was possible.
You can get right into the zone when you want this to happen; you can draw on demand, rather than waiting endlessly for that elusive inspiration which seems to exist so far out of your control.
How can you use the Artist’s Language to help you draw better?
When you combine this unique method with other art techniques you become better equipped to focus directly on the task of drawing, rather than wasting mental energy battling your own mind and its negative thoughts. So, using the Artist’s Language can help you to take ownership of the internal conversation happening naturally in your mind, by enabling you to directly access your four major comparison skills. You can use these four comparison skills, in turn, to record accurate details of your object onto paper. This is the skill known as drawing.
In the following sections I’ll explain how to apply your Artist’s Language.
Next: How to use the Artists Language – a practical introduction
