Drawing can be hard, frustrating and scary. Here’s why you should do it anyway.

I’m convinced that learning how to visually express yourself enriches your life in vitally important ways. Not everyone agrees with me though. In our societies, drawing is generally seen as less important to learn than writing or maths, for example. When I was studying to become an art teacher, I felt in need of some scientific back-up to help me articulate my feeling that learning how to draw does matter. So, I read a lot of articles by Actual Scientists like Eisner, Scitovsky, Siegesmund and Sylvester, and was able to find three Really Real Reasons why you should draw.

Let’s look at the first reason to draw, which is:

Drawing lets you develop a unique way of seeing that relies on somatic knowledge and involves recognition of relations and proportions.

Somatic knowledge

Somatic knowledge is when you intuitively know that something ‘looks right’. I think it’s fascinating.

For example: let’s say you’re scrapbooking. How do you decide where on the page to put your photos, where to put the embellishments, or how big to make the text area? Do you use rulers? You could, but you could also use your somatic knowledge. You look at all the different elements, you arrange them on the page, and somehow you know where everything fits. You move a photo just half an inch to the left, and it’s perfect. That’s somatic knowledge. It’s about understanding relations: how do the different elements relate to each other, and in what proportion?

An aesthetic point of view

In our everyday lives, most of us look at the world from a practical point of view. What is that object I’m seeing, and what can I use it for? There’s another way to interpret the data that enters your eye, though. The scientists put it like this:

“To look at the world from an aesthetic point of view, you need to forget or ignore the name and function of an object, and look purely at the formal properties of that object and to what it expresses.”

You can look at a painting and see a chair, a table, a vase with flowers. Or, you can see shapes, lines and blocks of colour that together create a composition that makes you feel something. When you can look at the painting in this way, you are able to access a new source of information. This information is different from how we usually look at the world, but has just as much value.

Follow your intuition

The unique way of seeing that relies on somatic knowledge is kinda hard to explain in words. That’s because it doesn’t involve anything verbal or logical. It’s all about intuition and emotion. It’s essential for us humans not to lose touch with this side of ourselves, and drawing helps us do that.