JUST DO IT

I don’t want you to just read the book. I want you to just do it.

My sincere appreciation and thanks to those of you who have a copy of Transparent Drawing thus far. Many of you have written that you look forward to reading it. Yet I somehow hope that the book will inspire readers to pick up a pencil and make marks on a piece of paper with a shifted mindset.

I understand that this may be my fantasy state. After all, let’s say you haven’t drawn for awhile. Or let’s go further and say that you have told yourself for your entire life that you can’t draw. What are the chances the book will inspire you to pick up a pencil?

Well, one feature of the book is wide margins. I don’t know about you, but I annotate everything I read. And I absolutely hate books that leave no room for visual notations. So, again, in my fantasy, the large margins might facilitate a reader to pick up a pencil and to make some marks. Below, is a sample page from the book. There is room on either side of the center text column to draw!

And then you might say, ok, while I might be moved to just do it, what do I do it with? To answer that, I refer you to the Media chapter, in which a summary of the various drawing pencils and washes are presented. Or, whatever you find in the kitchen drawer that makes marks on paper will do just as well.

When you make those marks, you will say to yourself, well, that was not so bad. And I now have a better sense of what this Transparent Drawing thing is all about. And I did it, believe it or not, without anything involving software. To finish out the fantasy, you quite freely begin to draw holistic forms because you find you enjoy it. Drawing, after all, is fun. You read in the book that There Is No Bad Drawing. And this gives you confidence to just draw for knowledge. You read in the book a quote by Plato, or a quote by Gombrich, and it resonates with you. It nudges you just a bit. And that small nudge may be all that any of us need.

And you now are on a new pathway toward truth. Instead of fantasy, that sounds like reality to me.