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Comment by kenshiro_o | Hacker News Reader

I'd love to become good at drawing because I believe it can help presenting your ideas in a very visual and straightforward way. Moreover it is an activity that stimulates the creative and imaginative part of the brain. My main issue, aside dedication, is that I "suffer" from a natural tremor in my hands which I have been unable to shake off, even after seeing a doctors years ago and undergoing a battery of tests which showed nothing conclusive nor serious (I also took some pills which showed no results).

So my main questions would be: - Can I still be good at drawing despite my trembling? - How do I cure my trembling?

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As a practicing artist, most of my drawing is really done with the muscles in my arm, not with my fingers and hand. My hand is fairly relaxed, with just enough tension to keep the pencil/stylus/pen/brush making contact with the paper/tablet/canvas. You can force yourself to learn this by holding a common wooden pencil such that the side of the tip draws a big broad light line on the paper, rather than the point drawing a thin, dark line.

I don't know the full cause of your tremor, but I know that if you have a death grip on a drawing tool it will be a lot less steady in your hand. A light grip may or may not help.

Also of course learning to whip out lines quickly can help. If you tremble about once a second on average, and get enough control to whip out roughly the line you want in .5s, I can imagine easily finding a rhythm that avoids a lot of the tremors.

Alternatively you could just embrace the trembling and groove on a lot of Edward Koren.

I have exactly the opposite :) Ever since I suffered a burnout, I have a tremor in my hands, it's gotten a bit less over the years, but it's still there.

I can still draw. But I do it explicitly with my wrist+hand, not with my arm. I never have. Always rest my hand on the paper and draw with my fingers. Then I don't tremble, I only tremble when I gotta keep my hand still in free space. But on paper my hand's 100% relaxed and only moves as I want it to. Maybe it's because I've drawn things all my life and there's a trust in my hand that allows it to relax in that way.

There's two consequences to this drawing style: I draw best when it's really small, because of the range of motion of my hand and wrist (although there's a few ways I can use a marker and draw nice curves and cartoon faces on larger paper as well). I can't paint :) Because if you rest your hand on the paper you'll smear out all the paint :) This was already a problem in highschool, before I burnt out, it's just not how I want to interact with the medium. It's gotta be up close and personal.

Either way if my movements had to come out of my arm, my fingers would tremble, and it would suck.

BTW I have a similar fear for starting to learn electronics, I really doubt if I can handle a soldering iron and those tiny elements accurately enough to make things without it becoming a hugely frustrating exercise in "accepting one's limitations".

To the GP I say, try it, and really, try to relax about it (if relaxing helps with the tremors--it doesn't for me, 100%, which is why I also need to calmly rest my hand on a surface. but then it's pretty steady).

Is it really that bad? Because if it is it will naturally cause some problems and then it's really about medical support. But if you mean that your hand isn't that steady then it's not a problem at all, because it doesn't have to be and with a lot of practice (just like trying to draw straight line, triangle, circle, etc. again and again thousands times) it will improve anyway.

So, well, not to discourage you from medical help if you actually need some, but you shouldn't wait for getting better to start. Just find some tutorial (as I said already, I don't recommend Edwards, better start with Dodson or Loomis or anything else somewhat serious) and do something. Even if you'll be disturbed by your illness your practice lets you sublime anyway, which is good by itself.

As it's been said: nothing's impossible for a willing mind.

I'm not a great drawer myself, but I'd guess it depends on the intensity of your trembling. Most sketches don't rely too much on individual stroke precision, specially if you don't have very good coordination. In math terms, you can think of repeating your strokes successively so that the noise averages out; the eraser is your friend in this process also.

What you say here is correct, but let me point something out: that repeated stroking isn't very good thing if you can avoid it. It's like a habit for many people and you often see that good artists do that, but it's good to try being "minimalistic" as you learn. Just advising. You'll notice improvement pretty soon after you'll stop fixing every line by repeated stroking and will just try doing it right.

I think you'd be amazed at what you could accomplish if you focused on composition and color. You might a hard time making really polished drawings, but you still have the potential to create things people will recognize and delight in. You might want to check out the art of John Cuneo. (Charles Shultz also famously suffered from a tremor later in life.)

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