Drawing seems to be at the intersection of a lot of things I'm interested in and a lot of people that inspire me. I've always wanted to be better at it.

Many years ago, I took a course through the Harvard Extension school. We met each week at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts. It's a wonderful museum and the course was really good. I left it with a few drawings that I was proud of. I had two main takeaways from that course. The first is that creating a lot of drawings is the path to becoming a better artist. Second is that you need to see the drawing through to the end. Everything I created looked like a mess in the beginning, regardless of how well it came out.

I don't think there's much to this other than creating a lot of drawings. I have a pile of books that I've accrued (without fully reading) over the years that can help and that would be useful to work though. The structure of a book and the tasks it has you complete as you go creates a nice cadence for continued practice. Some of the books I have available include:

• The Natural Way to Draw by Nicolaides
• Keeping a Nature Journal by Claire Walker Leslie
• How to Draw What You See by Rudy De Reyna
• Drawing Ideas by Mark Baskinger and William Bardel
• Keys to Drawing by Bert Dodson
• How to Draw by Scott Robertson
• The Laws Guide to Nature Drawing and Journaling by John Muir Laws
• Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain by Betty Edwards
• Rapid Viz by Kurt Hanks and Larry Belliston

Of course, if any one book could make you a great artist, everyone would buy it. I've got to put the work in.

One thing I noticed while listing the books is that my interest in drawing leans towards industrial design and drawing nature.

I'm not yet sure how to judge whether I've finished this or not. Certainly, drawing is something that you can dedicate your life to and never reach the end of what there is to learn. That's not what I'm after though. I just want to create some pleasant illustrations to help convey thoughts and to capture inspiration. I need to think more deeply on when I would consider this complete.