Kimon nicolaides the natural way to draw

time and then try the next. There are other exercises that will take up the slack provided the effort has been made.

In most courses of study of any sort the general idea prevails that it, is to your credit to get through the work quickly. That is definitely not true in this study. If you are particularly apt, your advantage will lie, not in how much sooner you can 'get the idea' and 'finish,' but in how much more you will be able to do at the end of a year's work than someone less gifted. What you are trying to learn is not the exercise - that should be easy, for 1 have tried to make each one as simple as possible. You are trying to learn to draw. The exercise is merely a. constructive way for you to look at people and objects so that you may acquire the most knowledge from your efforts, As you begin, try to develop the capacity of thinking of only one thing at one time. In these exercises I have attempted to isolate one by one what I consider the essential phases of, or the essential acts in, learning to draw. I turn the spotlight first on one, then another, so that by coneentrating on a single idea you may be able most thoroughly to master it.

The exercises eventually become welded and the habits thus formed will contribute to every drawing you make.

Don't worry if for the first three months your studies do not look like anything else called a drawing that you have ever seen. You should not care what your work looks like as long as you spend your time trying.

The effort you make is not for one particular drawing, but for the experience you are having - m d that will be true even when you are eighty years old.

I believe that entirely too much emphasis is placed upon the paintings and drawings that are made in art schools. If you go to a singing teacher, he will first give you breathing exercises, not a song. No one will expect you to sing those exercises before an audience. Neither should you be expected to show off pictures as a result of your first exercises in drawing.

There is a vast difference between drawing and making drawings. The things you will do - over and over again - are but practice. They should represent tx~you only the result of an effort to study, the by-product of your mental and physical activity. Your progress is charted, not on paper, but in the increased knowledge with which you look at life around you.

Unfortunately most students, whether through their own fault or the fault of their instructors, seem to be dreadfully afraid of making technical mistakes. You should understand that these mistakes are unavoidable.