 I'm in the car about to set off on quite an epic journey on my drawing course for the next week in Wales. I can't draw yet. I'm going to take you along on the journey so you can see how it goes. So I'm not going to do loads of like filming and vlogging of the actual thing because I think that will stop for me kind of living in it but I do want to document it a little bit and partly so that anyone who might be thinking about going on this course in the future could get a little bit of a feel for what it's about. I think each day we're learning a different skill and day one was about the perception of edges which right away actually has made me start looking at things a little bit differently but before we even started thinking about edges we had to do like a pre-course task. Now if you've ever looked up the Betty Edwards drawing on the right side of the brain book or course which has been around for many many years you will have seen these amazing like before and after portraits where people draw themselves at the beginning of the course and then five days later at the end of the course they draw themselves again and this is done just purely as a record so you can see what progress you've made but it's also quite a lot of fun. Now this is probably the thing I was most worried about because it's fine trying to do something once you've been taught how to do it and even if you don't get it right but you've got some idea about how to even try and approach the task but for me sitting and staring at my face in the mirror which makes me feel pretty bloody uncomfortable and then having to draw it when I don't know how I've never ever been taught how was quite hard and you know I yeah it's so there's a moment off but then I just kind of got on with it and remembered that we you know what the worse this is then the better the before and after comparison will be so you know let's just roll with it and I did my best and well and when Anna our course leader bought the big pictures in afterwards she then gave them out so everybody could look at everybody else's pictures which again I think made us all go ooh don't know about this but again this has become a really important part of the course right in the beginning is actually being open in our learning and sharing our stuff with each other and also realising that when you look through all the pictures so we look through the 12 pictures including our own and you found many people sorts of the same when you got your own you kind of were quite harsh and self critical of your own picture but actually you looked at everyone else's far more inquisitively and you found the things you liked about it and the rest of the day was spent looking at so this perception of edges and shapes and Anna was teaching us to look for the spaces between things rather than just to see the things so we did a copying exercise where we took a well known line drawing and we actually had to copy it very accurately using measurements and stuff but we copied it upside down and we were always looking for the shapes and the spaces so instead of thinking you know I'm drawing a hand or a chair or a jacket you were just thinking okay that's a triangle and it's about you know this shape and this angle in relation to the next shape is this and we worked through it and again we then all looked at each other's and we were able to discuss what we found difficult and easy and how we found the task and I then went back in the evening and did another upside down drawing using a little bit more of what I'd learnt since the first one and this was someone on a horse and actually I really enjoyed that so now I'm going to talk about day two on the course which was really hard and according to our instructor Anna it is the hardest day is the day when lots of people want to give up and that was reassuring so I kind of came along because I wanted to enjoy it and have fun and I wanted to learn to enjoy the process of drawing I don't really care about being able to draw but yesterday was a day where at times it felt really frustrating. We drew a picture of our own hand so we used a picture plane and we had to place this kind of perspex over our hand I'll put together a bit of video to show you but it's a kind of hold of pose with our hand to foreshort and view which is where you get like distorted because some of it's closer so you'll see here that the fingers aren't exactly all the size you'd expect if you were to draw them because some are closer to you and some are further away you'd essentially put a perspex over that and then we drew round it with and then we transferred that onto the page and use that as the beginning of our drawing for our hand and then we learned how to add in the light and shade and that sort of thing but we learnt really the importance there about really carefully transferring across measurements so we didn't do what our brain was telling us to do we actually had to do what we knew were the correct measurements having literally transferred it onto the perspex and then across to the paper and I found that tricky but okay it just had to keep checking myself and all my assumptions were wrong we put all our pictures up we're doing this for everything putting all our pictures up so we can see what everyone else did at the end and it was like whilst I could see lots of problems with mine I was quite proud that I produced something that you can tell it to hand and also when I looked at everyone else's we'd all done something different and actually I really enjoyed hearing about everyone's hand and how the process was for them I was quite impressed that I was able to produce that and it's not you know if you just show me that day and a half ago and said you'll be able to draw that tomorrow I wouldn't have thought I could in the afternoon we then went on to do the task that made everyone want to cry which was we were drawing negative space so we had to draw a chair or a stool and then we had to draw the the object by drawing the spaces rather than by drawing the objects and by doing that very carefully measuring and moving across from a small scale to a larger scale which was all very hard and I think it's fair to say I totally cocked it up I just I don't really know what it was about it that went wrong for me I was getting the angles wrong and the side anyway anyway I I tried and kind of got to a point where I felt I was at point of no return or I was absolutely going to have to start again and I'd already started twice but we were also quite a long way into the task and there wasn't going to be an opportunity to carry on in the evening because the room had to be reset out so I was kind of in the slightly panning is like it's fine I'm going to go away I'm going to have a walk maybe have a cry I didn't have a cry but I felt like having a cry I was really frustrated and feeling like I can't do this I don't know why I can't this everyone else was drawing away happily and I thought I'm the only person here who's struggling with this what's wrong with me and really loads of negative self-talk went outside it's amazing the scenery is beautiful took five also then a couple of other people came out and I discovered that they weren't enjoying it either they also were finding it really hard they also wanted to cry and felt they weren't doing it at all even though I looked over and they seemed to be doing really well so I realised um I was not alone how I felt um then I went in and I actually asked the teacher to help me and she she helped me get back on track so she actually doesn't like to draw on our drawings but I was like I can't I can't fix it so she helped me to work out a little bit where I'd gone on with the angles um and plotted some of the major kind of points of the chair to get me back on track I was then able to fill it fill in the rest of the spaces myself um and I had something that resembled a chair that wasn't entirely distorted it looked like you could sit on it and then I really enjoyed the process of beginning to add in the light and shade now I didn't finish this as much as I would have liked to you know I got I got close to finishing and I felt actually there was an immense sense of pride having gone through that real frustration to then asking for help which isn't historically something I've always been good at so asking for help and then creating something that in the end something that was okay and that's a really really important learning for me I think so yesterday was day three of course and it was hard actually it's all been really hard um not in a bad way I really like being challenged and actually having to go back to the beginning and feel like a beginner again and really work hard has been incredibly good for me and the other thing is that normally I'm the teacher rather than the one being taught and realizing how tiring it is learning new stuff and how much chance you need to put things into place and how sometimes just a bit of quiet and contemplation is okay and things need repeating I'm learning a lot about teaching from being taught let's put it like that anyway so yeah it was hard work um but it was good we were learning about the perspective and how to make things shrink into the distance and the angles that things are at and the fact that we're often wrong when we think what's going to happen um so we we learned a bit about the theory of that um and we learned how to put down the marks on a page if we were going to draw kind of we we were learning to draw like a structural picture so we were looking at lots of people were looking at the corners of rooms I was looking at the corner of a building from the outside um and then drawing that and it was a really interesting exercise being we were being quite methodical like plotting the image that we could see onto the page which we've done throughout been quite methodical and and you had to kind of we were told you know measure or or check twice draw once um and I was more like check 10 times draw once rub it out draw again sort of thing but I got there in the end um and I I found that um your brain really plays tricks on you so when you're looking at something you think you know what's happening like in particular I was drawing um a building and I thought I could see what's happening with the roof sleeping sloping around the distance I thought the angle or something like this and actually when I drew it was something like this and it just looked really wrong when I first plotted it but when I kind of got all my points down and I drew the whole thing and I shaded it in I mean it was a strange looking drawing but then when I looked at the actual thing I was drawing it just was a bit strange I'm getting more confident in my drawing so I stayed on again last night and I did a couple more drawings um on day two we'd used uh lots of lighting and a couple of those lights were quite like old lights and they were lying around and um I thought they were interesting to draw so I I drew each of those and I I consciously did each of them in less than an hour because I wanted to try and push myself through to draw quite quickly I was able to get something that resembled the thing it was meant to be. Yesterday was day four and it was a lot of fun so we were really beginning to consolidate the skills that we've learnt over the beginning days and we did that by drawing a profile portrait so a silent portrait like this uh of a classmate um it was it was interesting the way that the classroom had to be set out very precisely because we were a group of 12 and basically we sat in kind of groups of four with you know this person drawing this person this person drawing this person this it was very confusing to describe um but it worked um and at any given time one two people in the group of four would be drawing and two people would be posing and then you would switch over um one of the most interesting things about that actually just as an aside um was how it made you question your concept of time when you were drawing um the time went by in no time at all um and then the timer would go and she did set a timer to make sure it was fair the time would go after 20 minutes and you'd feel like you've been drawing for no time at all and then it would be your turn to pose for the person drawing you and the next 20 minutes would feel like days like ice ages occurred it felt very very slow I learned as much in those 20 minute pauses um which really made you really stop and think about what you were drawing then yeah by the end of that 20 minutes suddenly um you'd be full of ideas you almost wouldn't know where to start because you had so much that you needed to do it was really interesting so the very initial stage of just getting this very basic outline of the profile phase was was slow um it felt frustrating it felt like you were never going to get it right and it was really difficult to relate that to what was in your head and what you thought you could see in front of you but as you then began to add the light and the shade and the texture and the negative spaces and all that kind of thing it then began to come to life I was drawing a guy called Mike who had um bright white hair which I found beautiful I hadn't noticed his hair um until I was staring at it intently and it was just beautiful I came really fascinated by his hair and I heard other people say similarly oh I got really taken by my model's forehead or their nose you know they really like the shape of it and the angles of it just made you really appreciate people in a different way I guess and one of the other delegates had kindly let me take a profile picture of him so I drew him and I actually this time instead of having all afternoon to do it I just gave myself an hour and just said look you're just going to do what you can in an hour I learned something doing it and I enjoyed doing it and yeah so yeah I'm going to try and draw every day draw every day so I came here five days ago and I couldn't draw five days later and I can like I've put so much more to learn and I'm really excited about practising and learning and developing my skills but I can actually draw um and that's pretty cool