Sunday Mailbag: Can Anyone Learn to Draw?

Q: I have career in medicine. However, I always had a great passion for drawing. Since I have spend most of adult life working and in school I had little time to allocate to drawing. I purchased your book last year and have been reading it. This leads to my question–could one LEARN to draw or is this a talent you either have or do not have? I don’t want to be a professional artist, I just want to be decent at drawing especially cartoons and caricatures.

A: Ah, the age old question… is an artist born or bred? Do you need natural talent or can anyone learn to be an artist?

The answer is anyone can learn to be an artist, so long as reasonable expectations are applied. I always compare learning to draw to learning to play the guitar. Anyone can learn to play the guitar. With enough study/lessons and practice anyone can learn chords, the mechanics of playing, songs from very easy to complex, and become competent at it.. even very good. However you need more than just practice and hard work if you want to become the next Eric Clapton or Jimi Hendrix. Art is the same. Through study and practice you can get good at drawing, but to become a Jack Davis or Mort Drucker requires both the hard work AND something else… call it “talent” for lack of a better term.

There are varying degrees of natural talent. Some people have a little natural skill, and that often drives them in the hard work/practice area so they end up maximizing that talent and progress very far. Some people have an enormous amount of natural ability and coupled with hard work they excel beyond what others who might put in the same amount of time and practice can. Getting back to my guitar player analogy, there are many millions of people out there who play the guitar. They range from people who can play a couple of tunes to those who are in local bands to some who play in bands people that are well known to studio musicians who are highly regarded to those who are considered the greatest of all time like Eddie Van Halen, B.B. King or Jimmy Page. The amount of time and practice put in has a lot to do with what level they achieve but no amount of practice will bring you to the levels of Van Halen, etc . You have to have something more inside for that.

That said, you can get to be a pretty decent guitar player on study and practice alone, regardless of natural talent. Same with art. You can take your art to as high a level as you are capable of through time and hard work. Also, and this is a very important point, you can enjoy creating art no matter what skill level you reach. Don’t let the driving force behind your artistic journey be impressing other people. Do it for yourself. Dedicate as much time for study and practice as you are comfortable with and as life allows, and you will improve with each drawing. Above all HAVE FUN.

Thanks to L Alvarez for the question. If you have a question you want answered for the mailbag about cartooning, illustration, MAD Magazine, caricature or similar, e-mail me and I’ll try and answer it here!