Drawing. The talent you never lose.

SYMBOL DRAWING : A talent you never lose . Symbol Ideas

DIGITAL DRAWING : Draw or Paint? . Drawing . Sharper Drawings . GIFs and JPEGs

Why symbol drawing is child's play

SO YOU THINK YOU CAN'T DRAW?

Ask a child of five or so to draw you a house.

Do they take their paper and crayons, go outside, sit down in front of a house and carefully draw what they see? ...Or do they, perhaps, keeep their eyes glued firmly to the paper and present you pretty promptly with a piece of artwork like this?

Child's drawing - house
This is a composite of actual children's drawings.

This is the Windows icon for 'Home'

Enough said. It's so easy to make your own icons and symbols that a child can do it. Why? Because there are...

TWO KINDS OF DRAWING

(Sorry to shout, but it's surprising how few people realise this!)

INSIDE-OUT drawing

When you draw from the inside out, you just draw the symbols that are already there in your head. You've been able to do it ever since you could hold a crayon.

OUTSIDE-IN drawing

The Paradise of Inside-Out doesn't last. One day you reach the Age of Wisdom... You (or your teacher) decide it's time for a dose of reality. Taking a nice clean pad of paper, you go outside, sit yourself down - and try to draw a house as it really is. From the outside in.

Result? A dismal failure, nine times out of ten.

If you're one of the luckless nine, you kick yourself because you can't perform as well as a cheap camera phone. You brand yourself as A PERSON WHO CAN'T DRAW - and confine yourself to doodling on telephone pads for the rest of your life.

I once addressed a room full of people who swore they couldn't draw. I asked them to write down symbols as fast as they could for a list of words. Things like Home, Smile, File, Art, Gardening, Industry and other general terms.

I was amazed. They couldn't stop! They got to the end of the list I'd prepared and looked up for more. I had a hard time thinking up new words fast enough.

That's why I know it's easy to make your own symbols and icons, or for that matter any very small images. Even when you 'can't draw'! You never had to be taught how to take the most significant part of something, and hold it in memory as a symbol - sometimes of an entirely abstract idea.