Drawing
- colin8863
- Jan 8
- 5 min read
My first love was drawing. No doubt about it. It was my entertainment and my way of impressing the family as a child by how closely I could copy cartoon images from my comics in coloured pencils, and later, my way of creating design work for my jewellery making both at college and afterwards. I realised that if I could draw it, I could make it. Drawing was the underlying structure for watercolours, acrylic and oil paintings and most definitely the basis of all my illustration work.

Self portrait in charcoal.
Drawing is a joy and hard work. And what I used to find easy as a child has now become something that I need to practice regularly to keep the skills sharp. Drawing is my go-to tool for observation whether doing life drawing or creating the initial studies for oil paintings. But it’s something that has to be done regularly or the ability to draw well slips back, and I never want to lose the ability again.
I say again, because when I was working full time at a range of ‘I need the money’ jobs after an art dealer ‘shrank his business’ (another way of saying went bust!) I had little or no time to do any drawing. At the time I didn’t realise how much I needed to keep up the skills and also, at the time, I lost heart in doing any form of art as a way to make a living or as something that gave me pleasure. Drawing and painting lost its lustre and I was in a creative desert.
12 years later, my love of drawing was rekindled when I decided to drop a day at work and start a part time MA in Illustration at the University of Gloucestershire. But it wasn’t easy. Those 12 years had cost me a lot of lost time honing my skills and I felt I was pretty much starting again, well below the standard of drawing I ended with 12 years previously. But as I began to draw and learn during the MA I recognised that my drawing skills had changed into something new. It seemed that, yes, I needed to get my skills sharpened but they were taking a new form in the drawing I was doing on the course.

Pen drawing for watercolour of an oak tree.
Drawing now was as much of an intellectual act as an artistic and aesthetic one. I was able to apply more critical analysis to my drawing work. No longer was it just a way to create pretty drawings, now I needed something to say and a way to say it through my drawings, and a way to assess the success of what I drew against a set of criteria I’d never thought about consciously before.
I started to really dig into what drawing meant to me both as a form of art practice and a way of exploring my subjects. The term ‘thinking through drawing’ came up time and time again on the course and later. I looked at ‘reportage illustration’ whose immediacy was coupled with the artist’s visual commentary about the situations or people being depicted often in war zones or in areas in the world suffering from great deprivation. I wondered if perhaps this was a good area to ‘get into’. I looked at children’s book illustration, comic book illustration and editorial illustration, but none of these really sparked the fire of true enthusiasm that I felt would carry me forwards into a new career.

Ink sketch of Gloucester Cathedral
I was trying to find where my type of work was placed in terms of a way of creating art and a tool to express ideas, notions, thoughts and comments. But drawing had become exciting again and when I left the MA I was certain that drawing would become central to my art practice and something I would continue to do in one form or another for the rest of my life, come what may. But when I left, I knew I didn’t want to become a professional illustrator.
After a break of a month or so to get my breath back after the exhausting work to submit my final major project in January 2021, I started looking for a way to take my practice forwards in a way that satisfied me. I really had no idea what direction I wanted to go in and I was a bit miffed by this. I spoke about this to my mate on the course, Steve Roberts who is now an abstract artist, and asked him what he was going to do but he was as lost as I was. It seemed the course had dumped us back into the world with an MA but no clue what to do with it.

Ink study of a house in Cheltenham
We just decided to stand in the landscape and paint to find out what might happen. And we both got hooked, finding the start of what was to become a career for both of us that fired our enthusiasm and could carry us forwards. Steve in his late 20’s and me in my late 50’s had found our ‘thing’. And for me it seriously scratched the itch to continue drawing as the foundation of my ongoing art practice. Problem solved? Not quite…..
This was early spring 2021 and as I write this blog entry at the start of 2026, I recognise I’ve come a long way from the MA through diligent hard work and consistent practice. But the need to draw has continued to nag at me to keep moving forwards in new ways that challenge the way I look, see and treat my ideas and subjects through drawing. My drawing has become confident but that’s not enough. I use a range of dry media to capture ideas and explore ways to put my paintings together in new ways, but that’s also not enough.

Life drawing - Paul - Evesham life drawing group.
So what is it about drawing that is as much obsession as essential tool in the artist’s arsenal of creative weaponry? When I look at the drawings of other artist’s whether professional, amateur, or hobbyist, I have to admire and rejoice in the fact that others love drawing. But it’s true what ‘they’ say that there are many paths and we all have to walk our own. At this stage in my art career in my 60’s I feel once again that I’m just beginning to scratch the surface of what drawing is for me and the incessant nag is now one that is pushing me to take the next step along my own path and respect that this path is mine and mine alone to explore. So, I’m keen to find out where it will take me next, pen, pencil, charcoal or chalk in hand.









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