Drawing Quotes

“When Van Gogh was a young man in his early twenties, he was in London studying to be a clergyman. He had no thought of being an artist at all. he sat in his cheap little room writing a letter to his younger brother in Holland, whom he loved very much. He looked out his window at a watery twilight, a thin lampost, a star, and he said in his letter something like this: "it is so beautiful I must show you how it looks." And then on his cheap ruled note paper, he made the most beautiful, tender, little drawing of it.

When I read this letter of Van Gogh's it comforted me very much and seemed to throw a clear light on the whole road of Art. Before, I thought that to produce a work of painting or literature, you scowled and thought long and ponderously and weighed everything solemnly and learned everything that all artists had ever done aforetime, and what their influences and schools were, and you were extremely careful about *design* and *balance* and getting *interesting planes* into your painting, and avoided, with the most astringent severity, showing the faintest *acedemical* tendency, and were strictly modern. And so on and so on.

But the moment I read Van Gogh's letter I knew what art was, and the creative impulse. It is a feeling of love and enthusiasm for something, and in a direct, simple, passionate and true way, you try to show this beauty in things to others, by drawing it.

And Van Gogh's little drawing on the cheap note paper was a work of art because he loved the sky and the frail lamppost against it so seriously that he made the drawing with the most exquisite conscientiousness and care. ”
― Brenda Ueland, If You Want to Write: A Book about Art, Independence and Spirit

“I wish I could draw you how I see you. I'd draw a boy with the most magnetic smile, and the kindest hands, and eyes that are gloomy, but can sometimes be bright. I'd draw a boy who deserves to see the ocean.”
― Jasmine Warga, My Heart and Other Black Holes

“Create with the heart; build with the mind.”
― Criss Jami, Killosophy

“I cannot rest, I must draw, however poor the result, and when I have a bad time come over me it is a stronger desire than ever.”
― Beatrix Potter

“When you draw something it lives and when you photograph it it dies.”
― John Fowles, The Collector

“All art is but dirtying the paper delicately.”
― John Ruskin, The Elements of Drawing

“But it is a pipe."
"No, it's not," I said. It's a drawing of a pipe. Get it? All representations of a thing are inherently abstract. It's very clever.”
― John Green, The Fault in Our Stars

“We all have 10,000 bad drawings in us. The sooner we get them out the better.”
― Walt Stanchfield

“Just because I'm doing what I love, doesn't mean It's always going to be fun.”
― Tsubasa Yamaguchi

“If a restaurant offers crayons, I always take them and color throughout the meal. It beats talking to the people I came to dinner with.”
― Stephan Pastis

“Drawing makes you see things clearer, and clearer, and clearer still. The image is passing through you in a physiological way, into your brain, into your memory - where it stays - it's transmitted by your hands.”
― Martin Gayford, A Bigger Message: Conversations with David Hockney

“practice makes better”
― Brian Lies

“It was amazing what an hour with her sketchpad could do for her mood. She was sure that the lines she drew with her black marker were going to save her years of worry lines in the future.”
― Victoria Kahler, Their Friend Scarlet

“We who draw do so not only to make something visible to others, but also to accompany something invisible to its incalculable destination.”
― John Berger, Bento's Sketchbook

“Drawing makes you look at the world more closely. It helps you to see what you're looking at more clearly. Did you know that?"
I said nothing.
"What colour's a blackbird?" she said.
"Black"
"Typical!”
― David Almond, Skellig

“The ones who constantly make us laugh are the hardest of friends to know - for comedians are the caricatures among us.”
― Criss Jami, Killosophy

“After a time, my hand had become as skilled as my eyes. So if I was drawing a very fine tree, it felt as if my hand was moving without me directly it. As I watched the pencil race across the page, I would look on it in amazement, as if the drawing were the proof of another presence, as if someone else had taken up residence in my body. As I marveled at his work aspiring to become his equal, another part of my brain was busy inspecting the curves of the branches, the placement of mountains, the composition as a whole, reflecting that I had created this scene on a blank piece of paper. My mind was at the tip of my pen, acting before I could think; at the same time it could survey what I had already done. This second line of perception, this ability to analyse my progress, was the pleasure this small artist felt when he looked at the discovery of his courage and freedom. To step outside myself , to know the second person who had taken up residence inside me, was to retrace the dividing line that appeared as my pencil slipped across the paper, like a boy sledding in the snow.”
― Orhan Pamuk, Istanbul: Memories and the City

“Look at that," he said. "How the ink bleeds." He loved the way it looked, to write on a thick pillow of the pad, the way the thicker width of paper underneath was softer and allowed for a more cushiony interface between pen and surface, which meant more time the two would be in contact for any given point, allowing the fiber of the paper to pull, through capillary action, more ink from the pen, more ink, which meant more evenness of ink, a thicker, more even line, a line with character, with solidity. The pad, all those ninety-nine sheets underneath him, the hundred, the even number, ten to the second power, the exponent, the clean block of planes, the space-time, really, represented by that pad, all of the possible drawings, graphs, curves, relationships, all of the answers, questions, mysteries, all of the problems solvable in that space, in those sheets, in those squares.”
― Charles Yu, How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe

“If I were to draw, I would apply myself only to studying the form of inanimate objects," I said somewhat imperiously, because I wanted to change the subjects and also because a natural inclination does truly lead me to recognise my moods in the motionless suffering of things.”
― Italo Calvino, If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler

“Drawing is the art of being able to leave an accurate record of
the experience of what one isn't, of what one doesn't know. A
great drawer is either confirming beautifully what is commonplace
or probing authoritatively the unknown.
::: Brett Whiteley :::”
― Brett Whiteley

“I'm not talented at all. It's just that I spend more time thinking about art than others.”
― Tsubasa Yamaguchi

“I realized how subversive Ruth was then, not because she drew pictures of nude women that got misused by her peers, but because she was more talented than her teachers. She was the quietest kind of rebel. Helpless, really.”
― Alice Sebold, The Lovely Bones

“Disney and I were a bad mix. For a year I was probably more depressed than I have ever been in my life. I worked for a great animator, Glenn Kean. He was nice, he was good to me, he's a really strong animator and he helped me. But he also kind of tortured me because I got all the cute fox scenes to draw, and I couldn't draw all those four-legged Disney foxes. I just couldn't do it. I couldn't even fake the Disney style. Mine looked like road kills.”
― Tim Burton, Burton on Burton

“Chiaroscuro, from the Italian for 'light/dark,' is the use of contrasts of light and shadow as a modeling technique for achieving the illusion of plasticity and three-dimensional volume in a two-dimensional drawing or painting. Leonardo's version of the technique involved varying the darkness of a color by adding black pigments rather than making it a more saturated or richer hue.”
― Walter Isaacson, Leonardo da Vinci

“But there was nothing I could do about people in my drawings. Their faces looked frightening, their hair was always straggly and the only characteristic that distinguished the sexes was their hair. My women looked like witches that had been made of broomsticks. When they had brooms, they seemed a part of them. The men looked like gnomes with pinheads. When I tried to improve on this, they turned into grasshoppers.”
― Bienvenido N. Santos, Memory's Fictions: A Personal History

“This is just the way that I draw; it's how I've always drawn. [...] I think of it like handwriting.”
― Roz Chast, Theories of Everything: Selected, Collected, Health-inspected Cartoons, 1978-2006

“Lazy looking is not really looking at all. It is when we guess or approximate things. When you really interrogate what you are looking at and challenge yourself to use and invent a wide range of approaches to capturing what you see, your drawing's will start to reflect your unique way of looking.”
― Lucy Alexander, The Central Saint Martins Guide to Art & Design: Key lessons from the world-renowned Foundation course

“If you experiment, you have to fail. By definition, experimenting means going to territory where you've never been, where failure is very possible. How can you know you're going to succeed?
Having the courage to face the unknown is so important.”
― Marina Abramović, Walk Through Walls: A Memoir

“Design is not what you see but what you want to see.”
― Niloy Roy

“That constitutes a chastening reminder for someone like myself, with a bias in favor of the written page and a sour prejudice against mass-market video: a reminder that, although images can be deceptive, they don't stand convicted alone. Writing is just another form of concoction. Words can lie too. You can trust me on this, probably.”
― David Quammen, Wild Thoughts from Wild Places