Digesting letterforms through making them by hand. Lots of patience and lots of starting over. It’s really good for me.

Exercise in establishing rhythm. Not so successful.

In my Form and Communication class we were instructed to keep a detailed sketchbook. The goal is to develop in us a deep sense of process and to always keep our brains moving and to stay creative in our sketchbooks. This wasn’t really new for me, I’ve been doing this since grade school; but what was a nice change of pace were the assignments given to be done in the sketchbook. While illustrating my family tree with colored ink, a circle stencil and a mechanical pencil, drawing baselines and cap heights I was staring at where I’ve come from. All the people who made my life possible and working in the tools that those in my profession used before me.

Before I could start at RISD for real they wanted me to take a condensed version of their foundation studies year. All freshmen coming into RISD take an entire year of 2D design, Drawing and 3D design before declaring their major.

At first I was skeptical. I’ve taken so many drawing classes, so many design classes, what was I going to learn? The drawing class was what I was least excited about. Over the past few years I’d come to terms with my drawing skills and wasn’t really interested in learning how to do things the ‘right way.’ I knew drawing is important to me as a graphic designer, I knew it’s a great skill to quickly communicate an idea, but I wasn’t really interested in developing this skill much further. I was kind of happy with where I was at.

On the first day I was told that everything we were doing was going to be in charcoal and that our drawings would be at least 18 x 24 in size and most likely larger. As someone who draws exclusively in ink, in a sketchbook that’s rarely larger than 8.5″ x 11″ I was admittedly less than excited. I wasn’t interested in trying to capture a specific likeness or doing a ton of intensive shading and proportional studies and all the things that take the fun out of drawing for me. But as class continued I was informed that the goal of our summer wasn’t that at all. Our goal was to communicate form using line, whether that form was realistically sized compared to the rest of the drawing was irrelevant. The form just needed to be resolved, to have depth and to be able to read as in front of or behind the rest of the form.

Charcoal got a lot more fun as I became more familiar with the medium and after being completely enraged with my lack of command over wet charcoal (spraying the paper with water and then moving the charcoal around with a foam brush) I grew to love the results I got. Drawing class was intense, it was frustrating, it was hot and sticky and dark and hard to stay awake in, but the results that were generated by drawing for 20 hours a week were hard to ignore. I had to come to terms with the fact that I actually learned something and am better as a result of the struggle. Something that I think we should all remind ourselves is that it’s about the struggle, that’s why we’re here. Embrace the struggle and you’ll be better for it.