“Drawing is a way of reasoning on paper. The doodle is the brooding of the hand.” -Saul Steinberg
"I make endless sketches...appreciate the vitality of black and white art studies." -Arthur Rackman
"Yes, I was always drawing as a kid. I was always on the floor with all my markers and a notepad with toys on the side. I really liked to draw these mazes that in order to survive you would have to jump from place to place. Adventurous type of drawings, where if you didn't make the jump, you might get eaten by a shark or a trap door with nails would open up, stuff like that." -Jose Parla
"It all starts with preparation, which is the "open sesame" of all genius. Even the geniuses admit it's 99% hard work and 1% genius. Conjure up a sense of story as you draw. Let it swirl around on the page, in and out amongst the lines and shapes, let the story influence every mark you make." -Walt Stachfield
"It's about the creative idea; discipline; having absolute command of the medium, constant productivity; the unexpected, absurd and nonsense." -Ronald Searle
“Art makes life worth living.” -Elizabeth Layton
"When I draw I rule the world." -Mort Walker
"I experience things by drawing them." -Eleanor Dickinson
"Being an artist was definitely a social plus. I remember being in maybe the ninth grade, sitting at this table in the art room with all these kids; they were really cool, attractive, older kids, people not like me. It was amazing because you could get a lot of respect for being able to draw. It was very exciting." -Dana Schutz
"When one sits down to do a drawing, one's inclination is to do it in a very harmonious way. I hate that. I can only get my artistic result by breaking away from the harmonious drawing, by being very attentive, highly disciplined, and aware that I am working against all that, that I am going against the grain." -Georg Baselitz
"Drawing is a revelation of the soul, of your personal situation. Even if a comic book artist spent his whole life drawing yogurt cups you would still see his most secret and deranging sensibility emerge. Drawing became my companion and a remedy." -Jean "Moebius" Giraud
"A special opportunity to start from the ground up. Being able to create new characters, vehicles and different worlds...and since when I started it wasn't even clear that the film would be made, I didn't have to limit myself." -Ralph McQuarrie, conceptual designer and illustrator talking about Star Wars.
"I'm enchanted by every occasion that an artist takes to express the influence the universe may have upon them." -Neil deGrasse Tyson, astrophysicist
"Leave all creative energies uninhibited." -Leonard Read from I, Pencil, 1958
"Those who create don't give up. Everyone has natural inspirations. However, those who create have the ability to shoulder the responsibility of shaping their idea and seeing it through to fruition." -Eiko Tanaka, Studio 4 C
"...animation is sort of this open door to fantasy land, you're only limited by what you can draw which can be sort of awesome when you're sitting down looking at the white paper, but it can also be a real delight." -Sally Cruikshank, Animator
"I love naive and folk art, art that has an unfinished look. I don't like the polished for the most part. Now what that means or where it comes from I'm not sure. But I was probably influenced graphically by artists I saw in school. And of course there's the comic book look, like Krazy Kat. A part of it was just lack of skill. Trying to take advantage of my own naivety. I'd really only had a semester of art school, so I hadn't evolved my style when I was doing all of this. It just comes natural, too." -Cal Schenkel, artist for Frank Zappa's album covers
"Know that a character you find by drawing in a sincere and observing way can stay with you and travel with you over time. I am very curious about this ability to create a character in the image world and sustain a relationship with it, contact with it, through drawing and writing." -Lynda Barry
"When you have nothing to do--if you're looking at it like, oh, now I got to work on a picture and make it the best I can make it then you're doing the wrong thing, you shouldn't be doing this stuff, it should be almost a compulsion, right? It should almost be this thing you can't help it, you just want to bring these things out, you want to paint these pictures, you're driven to it." -Justin Sweet, Carbon Canyon Studios
"Shading isn't drawing, and it isn't realism. Good drawing is not copying the surface. It has to do with understanding and expression." -Richard Williams, animator
"I wish I could just draw whatever the heck I wanted to and people would love it, newspapers would run it and I would be out on the town right now." -Heather McAdams
"...and sometimes it's not just the writing, it's just the simplest, crazy drawing that will make you laugh or smile and really influence you." -Chari Pere, cartoonist
"My drawings are compositions of recall. Remembering is a montage. To remember is an act of imagination, usually spontaneous and once the drawings are started they take a life of their own." -Lee Baxter Davis
"I believe we need to stress visual literacy in the schools. Young people need to understand that not all images are there to be consumed like, you know, fast food and then forgotten. We need to educate them to understand the difference between moving images that engage their humanity and their intelligence, and moving images that are just you know, selling them something." -Martin Scorsese
"A cartoon doesn't depend on the quality of the drawing so much as the idea. If it's a good idea anyone can do it. But a caricature has another quality. The 'abstract,' I suppose, is the only one I can use. Are Picasso, Lautrec and Hokusai caricaturists, graphic artists or painters? They were all caricaturists in my view." -Al Hirschfeld
"The rug is down, it's gonna be official, this is where I will make art...the character he [Lance Mountain] created around himself, that really kinda drew me in as a kid, then I started realizing the difficulty of the tricks and then appreciating all the pros more. [I go outside of an area to get inspired cause] I might find something weird that's going to influence me to do something in a different direction." -Chris Pastras, artist and skateboarder
"Every sect, every faction in school gave me grief, you know? It didn't matter, like, the jocks, fuck it. It was like, "Fuck you, man." It [skateboarding] was the only thing I could find sanctuary in, you know? A sense of piece. It wasn't like anything else that had ever existed. This was like a sort of constructed thing where you got the best guys from each of their disciplines." -Tommy Guerrero, skateboarder and part of the Bones Brigade
"...don't get me wrong, I learned a lot of basic tricks that I pick up from everywhere else. But I try to absorb them so that I can build something else out of them. 'Cause the joy isn't creating something, the joy is what comes out of you...that keeps me going." -Rodney Mullen, skateboarder and part of the Bones Brigade
"The author has not followed the precedents of any other artist, nor has he been able to copy Nature herself. He who departs entirely from Nature will surely merit high esteem, since he has to put before the eyes of the public forms and poses which have existed previously in the darkness and confusion of an irrational mind, or one which is beset by uncontrolled passion." -Francisco Goya
"Louis Agassiz was entranced with nonverbal, visual ways of understanding and representing nature. He called the draftsman's pencil '...one of the best eyes.'." -From the book, Louis Agassiz: Creator of American Science by Christoph Irmscher
"In fact, I am afraid of black color. I also think as being an artist, I felt I should be responsible for choosing every single color. Every colors I choose, even the very first dot I put on paper. Works I did only with black graphite on white papers meant I was lazy. There are millions of colors existing in world, and I often thought, I should be creating some new kind of color combination. More correctly, I am afraid of letting the black color remain on the paper as it is." -artist You Byun
"This is the start of a successful illustration that only is limited to black and white. Having done this kind of illustration, elaborate color illustration for about, let's say over 40 years, if it looks good at this scale it's going to look terrific at the full size. This is a very critical stage in the invention of an illustration layout. Plan major value areas." -Syd Mead on small b/w thumbnails
"Art is a form of exploration, of sailing off into the unknown alone, heading for those unmarked places on the map. If children are not permitted -not taught- to be adventurers and explorers as children, what will become of the world of adventure, of stories, of literature itself?" -Michael Chabon
"Cartooning is blazingly important because everything about politics screams imagery at you. We live in a mega-visual universe where thousands of things are pouring out of the screen at us every day, so you have to process it. You have to stop and have one still image. People think, 'Ah, it's old-fashioned' but it's not. You can actually say a lot of things in a single picture, making people stop and look. What's wrong with that? I think drawing is a way of inquiring about the world and it mystifies me why it should have gone out of fashion, and why it should be considered somehow inferior, because there is definitely and hierarchy between high art and low art. Certainly comic art is at the bottom." -Steve Bell, English cartoonist
"All journaling is a processing aid, it's a meditation or a psychotherapy. It's a way to collect your scattered, confused thoughts and organize them into images and text. To translate your brainwaves into sharable data. Whether that sharing occurs between you and a future version of you or you and some unknown reader that transition is worthy even vital for some, like my self." -Lucy Knisley, french milk artist.
"For me, journals are a place of dialogue with myself, a testing ground for ideas, a pal, a repository for the stuff of the highway of my heart." -Rainer Judd
"Later, I started to draw, and I drew an Assumption, a sort of stained glass window. I showed it to Matisse, he said, "You must turn this into a window, you'll put it in your chapel." "Monsieur, we have no plans for a chapel.", "It doesn't matter, we'll design a chapel around your stained glass window." -Sister Jacques-Marie about artist Henri Matisse and the Venice Chapel
"Good ideas usually evolve out of pretty lame ones, and vice versa." -Gary Larsen
"I've never done anything that I didn't think couldn't end in an accident that would be the best thing to happen to me." -Peter Beard
"Words separate, pictures unite." -Otto Neurath
"Cartooning is all about exaggeration. Most of my strips come from observing some way in which we behave strangely or illogically, and then exaggerating it so it becomes ridiculous." -Howard Cruse
"I remember laying out on my living room floor and drawing while the second side of The Plastic Ono Band record played over and over. The drawings weren't very good; lots of dots. Dot blobs and dot mud piles. I got really interested in fineness though. I think the drawings are simple meditations that help my cope." -artist Sean Alexander
"Being a graphic artist, I started looking at everything a little further past what is fashionable. I could see all the things I'm supposed to look at as a designer, but then I would look at regular stuff and the 'undesign' in that, the beauty in that, and became interested in functional things instead of beautiful things. What I'm interested in, the most common denominator, is really simple stuff." -Aaron Draplin
"The best comics are personal, idiosyncratic works that reflect a unique and honest sensibility...to express truths and to reveal and help us understand our world." -Bill Watterson
"Time spent practicing is the true sign of virtue in a musician. When you practice, it means you are willing to sacrifice to sound good. Seek out instruction, find an experienced teacher who knows what you should be doing. Understand the purpose of practice. Organize your time. Set goals and chart your progress. Strive for something. Concentrate. Relax. Slow down. Practice harder things longer. Practice with expression. Learn from mistakes. Don't show off. Think for yourself. Be optimistic. Look for connections." -Wynton Marsalis
“When you have no workshop you can always draw.” -Alexander Calder
"...there are no rules in my thinking about painting. That's why I hate to teach because my theory is to have no theory at all. I don't think you can be fenced in. I don't particularly like teaching because I have to go through things I have already done. To be a good teacher you have to stick to fundamentals. I've had a good many fundamentals in my life, but I want to go beyond and be experimental and be always eager to look around the next corner. I feel there is such a wide opportunity in what I'm after that it's more a matter of boiling something down to the thing that is closest to me in my heart. And I am not talking about technique, which rather bores me. Technique will take care of itself...To me, it is simply a question of whether or not I can find the thing that expresses the way I feel at a particular time about my own life and my own emotions. The only thing that I want to search for is the growth and depth of my emotion toward a given object. To be interested solely in technique would be a very superficial thing to me." -Andrew Wyeth.
"Drawing is the single most fruitful and vital artistic skill at work in the world today. Drawing lies behind almost everything around us in the modern world. Drawing is everywhere." -Andrew Graham, BBC, Secret of Drawing.
"As far back as I can remember, I was drawing. Almost as soon as my fat baby fingers could grasp a pencil, I was marking up walls, doors, and furniture. To avoid mutilation of his entire house, my father set aside a special room where I was allowed to write on anything I wished. This first "studio" of mine had black canvas draped on all the walls and on the floor, here I made my earliest "murals." I still have a drawing that my mother preserved from the time I was two years old. It represents a locomotive with a caboose, going uphill. My favorite subjects in childhood were machines-especially trains, locomotives, and train crashes. Then came battles, besieged trains falling from bridges, and occasionally mountains, with the mines showing inside them." -Diego Rivera
"Kirby is mainstream comics. He is Marvel comics, and I love his artwork to pieces, mostly from the late ''50s to the late '60s. It's funny when we tell people this guy is great, this stuff inspires us. And they open a page and they see Thor throwing a hammer through a building and they ask, "This inspires you?!" Yeah!" -Gilbert Hernandez, The Comics Journal, January, 1989
"Follow your enthusiasm. It's something I've always believed in. Find those parts of your life you enjoy the most. Do what you enjoy doing...there are stories to tell which don't exclude children and don't insult adults, which don't exclude adults but which don't insult children, which can be outrageous and innovate without being arch or misanthropic...anarchy that celebrates rather than destroys. Projects are driven by creative energy, enfranchised whim, and passion." -Jim Henson
"There was a back and forth process where if we would design a rough one we would build the thing we would put it on videotape, and then we would all look at it, talk about it a while and then pull it all apart and start all over again. And so the final characters that are on film now in the Dark Crystal are many generations down, they've been build, and rebuilt and changed and shifted and so each character is the result of sort of many generations of growth." -Jim Henson on Dark Crystal
"I always start with the eye. The eye is the focal point." -artist Brian Froud
"I love to draw what pops into my field of vision and makes me happy. Trust your instincts. Keep working. Search for the truth. Have fun and travel." -Maira Kalman
"A draw pen, and a pencil leg, both made to slide into the leg of the dividers occasionally...a pair of brass dividers with a movable center for reducing drafts..." -Thomas Jefferson, ordering drawing tools from England, 1786
"With a pencil and white sheet of paper to hand...I would plunge into it, convinced that I would find my way again, in a maze of lines which at first glance would seem to go nowhere. And, upon opening my eyes, I would get the very strong impression of something "never seen"." -Andre Masson
"The classic is the more useful for all general purposes to the ordinary man. It can be analyzed and, therefore the principles of it can be taught. It demands order, discipline and the clear thinking out of problems. Indeed it is the only safe method yet invented for teaching beginners, because it starts from foundations that are geometrical and can be demonstrated. Magnificent, indeed, on the imaginatively realistic and emotional side of Art, some of the most wonderful results of all have been the rewards of the Romantic: but there almost everything depends on the temperament of the artist producing them as to whether they become convincing or not. Dealing mainly with the appearance of things as revealed by light, ignoring facts as they are, and seeking to capture the impression of a moment, delighting in the mystery of shadow and playing with accident, this method of drawing and painting is exceedingly difficult to analyze or define technically. It is a method that cannot be taught by rule." -A.S. Hartrick, Drawing (1921)
"To create pure reality plastically, it is necessary to reduce natural forms to their constant elements." -Piet Mondrian
"Books of examples, good and bad, are in abundance; but the language of Art, -any more than Greek or German- is not to be learned by merely copying its signs. Art has its grammatical elements and rules, and should be studied in its exact delineative and intellectual aspect, as well as in its more emotional expression." -William Walker, Handbook of Drawing, 1880
"Everyone starts somewhere. Even if the work is not perfect, everyone has something to say, some story to tell. Just keep on trying." -Peter Sis
"...Elizabeth Bishop is the version I'm stuck in now but it started, as a young person, it was record covers and the research that went on before internet to find bands you liked and even to find books you like. I definitely found out about Bauhaus from the band Bauhaus...that kind of research through wrong connections." -Artist Matt Connors
"Ratty drawing...Oh, yeah, it comes right out of the human being. Ratty drawing is natural, like the marks people make on crates when they write the numbers on them to ship them off...the line has some kind of content...emotion." -Gary Panter
"I wouldn't recommend too many art courses for aspiring cartoonists. You could never learn to draw arms like Popeye's in an anatomy class. Study and learn everything about life you can because your ideas will come from everything you know and experience. I started cartooning by copying my favorites in the funnies, so my style was constantly changing. I love to write and draw, so I never get tired of it. It doesn't get stale because I keep experimenting with new ideas and nuances of character. Creating ideas is exciting because you start with a blank piece of paper and an hour later you might have an idea that will live forever. Don't be afraid to work. You'll only succeed by working longer and harder than the next guy. Learn to take criticism." -Mort Walker
“When I'm sketching an angle, I draw seven or eight frames that tell a small story. I do the thumbnails myself, which are often absolutely impossible to interpret, and I need to stand over the artist to explain which side is up. These shots are all subject to change, and I usually don't shoot every one. I always overdraw. I draw more than I can possibly shoot in one two-hour movie. Then I begin cutting the storyboards down, taking seven or eight different frames, and finding one shot that symbolized everything I want to say in those drawings. That gives it economy and substance and a lot more energy. I cram every bit of visual information into one frame. The audience today, especially with the influence of television and the 30-second, often 10-second commercial, is seeing faster than they saw in the '50s and '60s. With every generation born, kids are taking information in quicker than we did when we were kids." -Steven Spielberg
"The transition from outline and specific construction to the figure rendered in light and shadow is quite a hurdle. Often the student is unable to make this jump. I can only say that you must have the courage of your convictions, believing that your way is right for you and for your time. Your individuality will always be your precious right and must be treasured. Expert use of the fundamentals is the only basis there is for learning to draw. These fundamentals can be listed, studied, and carried out in your own way: proportion, anatomy, perspective, values, color and knowledge of mediums and materials." -Andrew Loomis
"Do not fail to draw something everyday, for no matter how little it is it will be well worthwhile, and do you a world of good." -Cennino Cennini (influenced by Giotto of the perfect free-hand circle making), 1300's
"God creates, I do not create. I assemble and I steal everywhere to do it~from what I see, from what the dancers do, from what others do." -George Balanchine
"Never stop rehearsing your craft. Every painting is another step in an endless learning curve." -R.G. Smith, American Society of Aviation Artists Founder
"If you can't draw it, you don't know it." -William DeMyer, MD.
"Abilities attenuate with disuse." -Charlie Munger
"What I like most of all is to watch the art of creating a camioneta, and the time that goes into creating it. To use your intelligence to create the designs. When it's a design, what I do is I have a few sheets of paper in my house. I grab my sheets of paper and start making my own designs. And I like to improvise, because everything looks different when it's on the bus." -Mario Enrique Valle from the documentary La Camioneta
"Someone who truly tries to create something beautiful and lovely, and people who create things to neutralize the venom they produce every night in their dreams..." -Kenny Shopsin
"I believe drawing changes the brain...drawing also makes you attentive. It makes you pay attention to what you are looking at which is not easy." Milton Glaser
"Every human being is gifted with a delight in beauty and the creativity to express it." -Kanae Yamamoto (1886-1942) Introduced the free drawing (Jiyuga) movement to Japan.
"I really like sharing what's possible, and inventing new, with somebody, or talking about things, gee, if you combine this with that, or if you find the essential meaning of this over that, what's possible? It does participate in a very optimistic expression of the human spirit, and I don't think that is something that can be put aside completely for the things that immediately heal somebody. To me, when I, the museums and the music that I hear has given complete identity and meaning to my life." -Artist Lester Goldman
"What adults call 'wrong' in Child Art is the most beautiful and most precious. I value highly those things done by small children. They are the first and purest source of artistic creation." -Franz "Father of Child Art" Cizek
"Art makes my mind bigger because it shows me something I've never seen before. I'm not getting it from nowhere else than from my head and God. This art right here." -Charles Smith, Trenton Soup Kitchen artist (A-Team)
"One of the reasons I love to draw is because I can get all dreamy and imagine a story behind the artwork and that makes it fun for me." -Jan Brett, artist and author
From: The Best American Comics 2012, Francoise Mouly, editor
Question: "For me, drawing comics is..."
"Getting it down on paper." -Charles Burns
"The single most effective way to express yourself if you're someone who's able to use words and pictures interchangeably. I sometimes balk at how time-consuming and isolating it can be, but anytime I stop, I'm usually sketching and tinkering with story and ideas again within a week." -Scott Chantler
"Calming. Dreaming while awake. A place to draw." -Gary Panter
"Like acting: I try to put myself into the mind of a character and use illustration to communicate their thoughts and emotions." -Nora Krug
"A way to share stories that people might have difficulty relating otherwise." -Sarah Glidden
"Something I admire, but not what I do, as I find it impossible to draw the same face twice. In this case, it's an extension of my series work and writing projects." Leanne Shapton
"A way of communication that can be both fun and informative for the reader. It's a lot of work, it's fun to do, and it's rewarding when other people enjoy the finished product." -Joyce Farmer
"One way among many of getting my ideas across." -Jim Woodring
"An amazing dance of pictures and words and a form of art that I return to time and time again. Also, it's a great way to tell stories!" -Ben Hatke
"1. A way for the characters in my head to come alive. 2. A really great job." -Sara Varon
"A labor-intensive, isolating, monomaniacal way of avoiding the painful minefields of actually human interaction." -Chris Ware
"The best way I've found to amalgamate my scattered ideas. I enjoy the way in which the drawing and the writing inform one another." -Jesse Jacobs
"A constant source of revelation." David Collier
"Painting is a companion with whom one may hope to walk a great part of life's journey. One by one the more vigorous sports and exacting games fall away, but painting is a friend who makes no undue demands, excites to no exhausting pursuits, keeps faithful pace even with feeble steps, and hold her canvas as a screen between us and the envious eyes of time or the surly advance of decrepitude." -Winston. S. Churchill
"There is an immense difference between seeing a thing without a pencil in hand and seeing it while drawing it. Even the object most familiar to our eyes becomes totally different if one applies oneself to drawing it: one perceives that one didn't really know it, one had never really seen it." -Paul Valery
"Every child, whose delight it is to scribble, draw, whistle, take off another, dramatize, jest, or tell a good story, is the rich, raw material evolution offers our Democracy for its own cultural building. What are we doing with it? The need cries out today for real pioneering research, not by psychologists or scientists alone, but by masters of vision in the several arts, who should be aided to combine and compare data in conjunction with scientists, psychologists and educators, to lay the foundation of a native culture through a planned program for the conservation and development of our neglected child talent." -Van Dearing Perrine, Let The Child Draw
"Contemporary methods of art instruction (freedom of expression, experimentation, self-evaluation of competence and growth) provide a vigorous, fresh-air approach for which we must all be grateful. New ideas need not, however, totally exclude the old. One such is the "follow-me, step-by-step" approach. In my young learning days this method was so common...it was excessively overworked. This does not mean that the young hand is never to be guided...specific guiding is fundamental. Mimicry is prerequisite for developing creativity." -Lee J. Ames
"I wanna see what you got...the complete expression of you in the moment. No restrictions...how you feel." -Savion Glover
"...we sell compost cookies that have chocolate chips in them but they also have butterscotch chips and pretzels and potato chips and coffee grounds and stuff like that and, making the menu was sort of just, making a bunch of stuff I knew I loved baking at home or making this cookie dough and throwing whatever I had in my cupboard into this cookie dough, and it made sense in my head and I was too busy to worry about it not making sense in anyone elses head. Play around. Make it what it should be like." -Christina Tosi, pastry chef, momofuku milk bar
"Talent, to me, means the ability to learn and acquire skill, and a capacity for creativity which comes from a genuine love of an art form. To me the word does not mean some magical "gift" that only a lucky few are born with." -Milton Gray
"..they think to tell a better story is to make the environments and the characters more and more realistic--so there's this push towards realism--that in some sense is really disconnected from the craft of storytelling--one thing game designers think about--what is it that players are doing in the game that gives them a kind of narrative experience and the visual representation can be abstract." -Katie Salen
“Creativity comes in all facets…have an opportunity to create. Give it a shot and see what happens.” -Michael Jordan
"Hold down and support your name. It belongs in the wild and in the city and alleys. Maintain your spots. Find your route. Evolve your work, mature. Stay fresh and interesting. Get myths and gossip going about you. Do something that adds validity to you. Do you count? Don't take work without an understanding of where it comes from and the progression of where they fit in and create a style that pushes the art form forward, work is technically tight but I can see who you sold from. Dali inspires me. Art is life-enhancing and is the best thing humans can chase. Style spreads so push it. TAG/NAME --> THROW-UP --> BURN/BOMB -->PIECE --> MURAL." -graffiti documentary, random artists: west, chaz, nerv, tribe, futura, scene, picasso (graph writer),
"The hot rodder was being placed on the endangered species list and no one cared. But the need to express oneself through steel, paint, glass and the chemical-to-mechanical energy exchange that occurs in an engine still existed." -Ray Bohacz, Muscle Machines Magazine
“The arts seem to me to be a natural vehicle for greater understanding between cultures.” -Haitian-born artist Herve Telemaque
"I think it's crazy people have an Andreas Gursky, but not a $50 copy of 'Grand Theft Auto,'...for better or worse, it represents where we're at, in a lot of ways. It represents, culturally, where art is at from a popular perspective." -Tom Sachs
"...one becomes an artist through a drawing response to a live situation, and then through experiencing the dialectic interchange resulting from live critique of one's efforts." -Graham Collier
"An artist must train his or her memory and critical eye. Start with analysis. With an airplane, for example, estimate the length: the nose may stick out for a quarter of the length, the chord of the wind, another quarter. Figure it out. Investigate the aircraft very carefully while challenging yourself with questions. Where is the light, the cast shadow? Everything that you see can be pictured in terms of light and shadow, lines and spaces, verticals and horizontals. You train yourself to analyze what you see and you are actually seeing more than anybody else." -Keith Ferris, American Society of Aviation Artists
"Without unceasing practice nothing can be done. Practice is art." -William Blake
"Always seek to revitalize, extend, and reconstruct the status quo." -John Coltrane
"It will take a lot of real drawing...not clever, slick, superficial, fine looking stuff...but real, solid, fine drawing to achieve those results...you must learn how to draw and control your drawings to the Nth degree..." -Vladimir "Bill" Tytla, one of the original Disney Animators
You simply must love drawing.
The only way to improve your drawing is through hard and continuous work.
There will always be an essential point to master in the course of improving your drawing. Understand and maintain your desire to improve. Develop it. Learn by doing it. It won't be a waste of time since something will come of it. Train your eye to observe. Draw all the details with great care and your skill level will improve. Have some sense of history. Your experiences and your knowledge will integrate into your work. Be flexible, gain fundamental drawing skills and study the representative works of various different genres. A true crafts-person puts their heart and soul into their work.