Lesson 19

As noted in the previous lesson, I have suggested to students that they should do a hundred drawings. This was usually met with some incredulity. But that’s twenty drawings a day, ten in the morning and ten in the afternoon, leaving the evenings and weekends to yourself, totally possible and in some cases I let them do it over two weeks, so that’s just five drawings in the morning and five in the afternoon.

Of course this is more than an endurance test, it forces creativity and innovation; you cannot keep repeating the same drawing. One hundred drawing can represent an important change of direction and a greater commitment to their art.

The real test was when the hundred drawings were complete. The suggestion was that the students select the drawings making three piles, good, bad and mediocre. After this selection process the student might only have six drawings in the good pile, but these are usually the six best drawings they have ever done and could have not been produced by just doing six drawings and not grafting and making many decisions.

The only problem with this exercise is that my selection would be different, as I usually liked the drawings from the ‘bad’ pile. However, this process also gave the students the opportunity to say why they chose a drawing for the good pile and why the drawings in the bad pile did not come up to muster. Here the student was articulately forming their value system.