From my point of view, drawing is the most effective window of my brain, helping to express what’s exactly in my mind freely.
Below is my drawings which represent different status or mood in my daily life:
#1 This was the first time I heard one of my most famous harmonica-performance song, which reminded me the scene of laying down on the mow with my favorite harmonica playing the song of The Wind Forest. What a free and enjoyable life!
#2 This Mickey was from the girl I adored, and I draw this at the day of her birthday on the first page of her favorite book One Hundred Years of Solitude. It recorded my deep affection on her.
#3 This was a screenshot of a movie. I was absolutely caught by the leading lady’s concentration on painting and I felt that’s absolutely the most beautiful thing one could do at that moment. This strongly confirmed my adoration on painting and drawing.
#4 This was draw when I was on working holiday in Australia. And this is a definitely remote farm of Victoria. But I loved the life there so much, since it was so peace and quite, which just liked the life of Thoreau at Walden.
All those drawings are absolutely unprofessional, but they are definitely Damon’s style. Every time I look at them, they are so fresh and vivid in my mind, and that just feel like happening yesterday.
And below is another one I draw recently.
This’s my room! And actually it’s a model of my mind palace. It looks a little bit ridiculous, but fun for me. The critical principles of mind palace are the familiarity of the model and don’t let it be bored. This exactly works well in its unique way since it can easily trigger the related things in your memory. Actually, it’ll be much more bizarre in my imagination than this drawing you’re seeing now, since the more exaggerated it’s, the better it’s for memory. That’s how our brain works.
What I’m trying to say through drawings above is that drawing freely does help to express and strength your mind. And if you wanna get this technique by self-education, I would like to recommend a classical drawing book which is called Keys to Drawing, written by Bert Dodson.
The reason I recommend this book is that it not only teaches you how to draw in a simple way, it’s much more about teaching you how to think how to draw. It emphasizes not the action of drawing, but observing. Only when you can see through the essence of things, you see things in a simple way and then you draw well.
Here’s what Bert Dodson said in the Introduction page of this book:
“We cannot bring to bear all our knowledge at once. What we can do is concentrate on our subject and trust our eyes. Keys to Drawing essentially is learning to trust our eyes and learning different ways in which we can reinforce that trust.”
“Drawing is primarily a process of seeing rather than strictly an application of principles. Other keys — such as restating, visualizing, merging and mapping — are really by-products of seeing put into the language of the artist. “
“The project is not to produce handsome drawings but to introduce you to new ways of seeing and responding.”
Offer yourself a ten minutes to draw a sketch as a start. Once you start, you won’t stop.
Very cool! My mind always goes Picasso!
Aha! Then I strongly encourage you to draw it out. And the more you draw, the better and clear idea will emerge to your mind and then you can draw much more and better than before, and then get all those things connected to generate something new again. That's quite a positive cycle!