All art is but dirtying the paper delicately.

Not at all. You look as though magic has taken hold of you. It must be magic because I don’t know how you can draw like that. I can barely manage a stick figure.

Some days drawing is a real struggle. Hopefully, using the exercises in this book, it will become easier and more and more relaxing. Until that happens you may have to just accept the difficulty and...

Drawing makes you look at the world more closely. It helps you to see what you’re looking at more clearly. Did you know that?”I said nothing.”What colour’s a blackbird?” she said.”Black””Typical!

For me, drawing generates thinking and vice versa.

Matisse makes a drawing, then he makes a copy of it. He recopies it five times, ten times, always clarifying the line. He’s convinced that the last, the most stripped down, is the best, the...

When I draw something, I try to build some kind of history into it. Drawing an object that has a certain amount of wear and tear or rust; or a tree that is damaged. I...

I can draw like it’s nobody’s business. I use my door as a canvas, so don’t knock, because it’s nobody’s business.

Drawing is the art of being able to leave an accurate record of the experience of what one isn’t, of what one doesn’t know. A great drawer is either confirming beautifully what is commonplaceor probing...

Over the last forty years, many educators, decision-makers, and even some parents have come to regard the arts as peripheral, and let’s face it, frivolous—especially the visual arts, with their connotation of ”the starving artist”...

Writing is an abstract art of drawing pictures of the conscious and subconscious mind with words.

In pre-school, I was drawing dinosaurs – I was huge into dinosaurs. I wanted to be a paleontologist, not a cartoonist or a filmmaker or anything like that – just a paleontologist. So I would...

I keep drawing the trees, the rocks, the river, I’m still learning how to see them; I’m still discovering how to render their forms. I will spend a lifetime doing that. Maybe someday I’ll get...

The depressing majority of comics seem to be about violence of one sort or another, […] And I just don’t enjoy violence. I can see that narratively it is often a powerful spike in a...

Look at that,” he said. “How the ink bleeds.” He loved the way it looked, to write on a thick pillow of the pad, the way the thicker width of paper underneath was softer and...

Having seen one of William Steig’s letters, I mentioned to Arthur how similar I thought William’s handwriting seemed to the lines of his drawings.’I never connected the handwriting and the drawing,’ Arthur remarked. ‘But they’re...

I cannot rest, I must draw, however poor the result, and when I have a bad time come over me it is a stronger desire than ever.

Drawing on my past experiences, I used a lot of erasers. My aging wisdom is starting to look a lot like a nude portrait of Alice Neel.

Technique should be taught, not as an end in itself, but as somethingrelated to individual expression, as a means toward an end. One cannotseparate technique from expression. There is only expression.

I spend as much time as I can sketching from nature, Dartmoor contains such a rich variety of landscape, as many boulders, foaming rivers and twisted trees as my heart could ever desire. . ....

Visual storytelling of one kind or another has been around since cavemen were drawing on the walls.

Provided with a case of pencils, and some sheets of paper, I used to take a seat apart from them, near the window, and busy myself in sketching fancy vignettes representing any scene that happened...

Anyone can learn how to draw.

There are no mistakes in Zentangle, so there is no need for an eraser. If you do not like the look of a stroke you have made, it then becomes only an opportunity to create...

Drawing things makes them seem more real and makes me feel more alive. It also makes me pin down and remember things – landscapes, season, weather, occasions, incidents, people – that would otherwise have melted...

All that you need in the way of technique for drawing is bound up in thetechnique of seeing – that is, of understanding, which after all is mainlydependent on feeling. If you attempt to see...

When I started to draw, most of my influences were from other painters and illustrators, so I was drawing landscape at second hand, really. The trees were Rackham trees, or trees that I had seen...

There are days when I’m completely depressed and able to do only one drawing.

Fundamentally, he was two years out of sync. He felt pressure to keep working on the job and drawing his Cabinet together. There was too much weighing against it.

But perhaps it is always so, that men form their conceptions from fictitious, conventional types, and then—all the combinations made—they are tired of the fictitious figures and begin to invent more natural, true figures.

I paint the spirit and soul of what I see.

I looked up from my paper and tried to remember her name. I was drawing a blank. That’s what happens when I doodle in invisible ink.

Drawing is the honesty of the art. There is no possibility of cheating. It is either good or bad.

Evidently, a given object took no particular amount of time to draw; instead the artist took the time, or didn’t take it, at pleasure. And,similarly, things themselves possessed no fixed and intrinsic amount of interest;...

I wish I could draw you how I see you. I’d draw a boy with the most magnetic smile, and the kindest hands, and eyes that are gloomy, but can sometimes be bright. I’d draw...

The ones who constantly make us laugh are the hardest of friends to know – for comedians are the caricatures among us.

Toutes les erreurs de la critique commises à mon égard, à mes débuts, furent qu’elle ne vit pas qu’il ne fallait rien définir, rien comprendre, rien limiter, rien préciser, parce que tout ce qui est...

I’ve been actively engaged with mythic imagery ever since I picked up that Rackham book, but it really came into focus for me when I moved from London to the country. As I walked the...

(…) photography opened up quite a little Pandora’s box, kiddies. (…) Once we no longer had to depend on drawing and painting to record our existence — once they became an option — they mutated...

Instead of chasing the idea of truth, what we should be doing is embracing the medium of drawing and using it for a purpose that fulfils our needs as an artist or designer.

He had been a boy who liked to draw, according to my friend, so he became an architect. Children who drew,I learned, became architects; I had thought they became painters. My friend explained that it...

Brown paper represents the primal twilight of the first toil of creation, and with a bright-coloured chalk or two you can pick out points of fire in it, sparks of gold, and blood-red, and sea-green,...

This is almost always the case: A piece of art receives its f(r)ame when found offensive.

Hazel blue anemone in a little SeaSide cave…drawing currents from the sea turquoise blue on sparkling waves. In ocean dreams, the poet waits by his grotto, passing days. Rhyming verse, his mind creates where his...

practice makes better

If I were to draw, I would apply myself only to studying the form of inanimate objects,” I said somewhat imperiously, because I wanted to change the subjects and also because a natural inclination does...

The drawing is already partly there – it’s in the paper. And the paper is talking before you do.

When Van Gogh was a young man in his early twenties, he was in London studying to be a clergyman. He had no thought of being an artist at all. he sat in his cheap...

Draw without mercy.

Create with the heart; build with the mind.