Draw in the Dark! Yes, Really

Draw in the dark. Draw in the Dark! Draw in the DARK. I swear, try it! Hear me out.

OK, so picture this: it’s nighttime, and you want to draw. You grab some pencil, paper, and turn off all the lights. You light a candle, or get a small flashlight and make it as dim as you can. And now there’s nothing but you, your pencil, your paper. It’s hard to see exactly what’s going on with your drawings, but… that’s the point! You’re committing to a free drawing session. It’s going to be messy, and that’s the fun part! You’re allowing your brain to focus more on creating things instead of being hyper-critical. You can make loose sketches and scribbles, and just see where things go.

This isn’t only useful if you want to free-sketch. You can absolutely do this with references too! If you want to pull up a reference on your phone or tablet, and draw just by the light of the screen, you can! But don’t draw on the screen. The point is to intentionally make your drawings hard to see. When learning to draw from reference, you’ll probably hear advice from experts that you should be looking at the reference more than you’re looking at your own work, even while your pencil is moving! And I agree with that! What, you thought I was going to disagree just because I seem to do that a lot? Pbbbbt. You should be looking at your reference more, because you’re training your brain to draw things as they actually are and not how you think they are. Making your sketch harder to see can help with that!

For me, this sort of thing makes my creativity go totally wild. Most of my drawing ideas pop up in my head when it’s dark, whether intentional or not. I’m not saying I always draw in the dark, no – but it’s such a fun way to draw that I find myself looking forward to it. Now, I’m not an expert in any sense, so don’t treat any of this as fact, but I do find that being in the dark, with almost all visual distractions removed, sets my creativity into overdrive in ways I never expect. Is there a science to that? I don’t know. But maybe it’ll work for you too, and it’s harmless to try out!

I’m not even sure why I thought to try this. I do remember one night last year, I just… felt like being a gremlin, turned the lights off, lit a candle, and just started to doodle. And I got so many doodles done! This was also actually where this video series started. In the dark, by a candle. I started to think about how this worked for my creativity, and then I thought about the other things I did to get myself drawing, and, well, here we are. So will this work for you? Maybe! Maybe not. But I hope I got you excited enough to try it. So join me in the dark and let’s sketch!