The Value of Drawing

Draw. Just draw.

Draw because you feel. Draw because you’re nostalgic of your childhood adventures, and you don’t know how to express it in any other way than with cartoons of a little boy and his stuffed tiger. Draw because you’re in love, and sketching--a shared moment, an inside joke, a dream you have together--articulates this feeling better than any word or gift possibly can. Draw because you’ve been feeling off lately, and because you’ve been feeling strangely lonely, and a surreal or abstract piece of art is the only thing that encapsulates these emotions. Draw to be vulnerable, to describe to others how you experience life and the world, through a medium that has no words but somehow says it all.

Draw to be creative. Not the kind of creativity that’s advertised nowadays in our technological society, which is constantly pushing for us to Design an application that conveniences apartment search! Launch a startup that introduces a new way of learning! Build a robot to do our chores so we have more time to engineer more robots! No, draw to preserve that pure, childhood imagination that got lost amidst high school math and science classes -- one that created kingdoms in backyards, castles in treehouses, and monsters in sandboxes. Draw to be able to portray your own alternate universes of melting clocks and talking animals and flying towers. Create something, not to streamline food delivery or web browsing, but purely to transpose a magical world built inside your head to paper. Draw because without all these new innovations life might be harder, but without art we wouldn’t feel alive.

Draw to relax. Draw to slow down. Draw not to finish drawing, as you would finish an assignment or an essay, but draw to savour those moments in life late at night, with soft music and the gentle scratching of pencil kissing paper to keep you company. Draw because it’s one of those things in life without a right answer, without the most efficient algorithm that can be implemented, without the requirement of a perfectly reasoned argument. Draw because anything you draw is good, and right, and perfect, and completely yours. Draw because everything you draw is a new, beautiful piece of art that shares a bit of you with the rest of the world.

Just...draw.