December 3, 2025
Drawing is how I understand things best, and it’s one of the ways I teach myself new subjects. My top advice for anyone wanting to be a paleontologist is “learn how to write” and “learn how to draw”, which really boil down to, “practice writing and drawing”. You only get better by doing. There’s a great saying, that everyone is born with 1000 bad drawings inside them. You get to the good drawings — you get to be good at drawing — by exorcising the 1000 bad drawings. “I can’t draw” is just a shorter way of saying, “I’m unwilling to practice drawing.” (That probably sounds pretty strident. If you don’t want to be good at drawing, that’s fine. The world is big, full, a…
December 3, 2025
Drawing is how I understand things best, and it’s one of the ways I teach myself new subjects. My top advice for anyone wanting to be a paleontologist is “learn how to write” and “learn how to draw”, which really boil down to, “practice writing and drawing”. You only get better by doing. There’s a great saying, that everyone is born with 1000 bad drawings inside them. You get to the good drawings — you get to be good at drawing — by exorcising the 1000 bad drawings. “I can’t draw” is just a shorter way of saying, “I’m unwilling to practice drawing.” (That probably sounds pretty strident. If you don’t want to be good at drawing, that’s fine. The world is big, full, and busy, and not everyone has to be interested in every possible thing. Just don’t mistake “I can’t draw” for a good reason not to try.)
Drawing forces me to be a better observer. If I have to trace every line and contour of a fossil, I have to push my pen along those paths, and that compels me to notice them in the first place, and wonder about them. Why this shape, and not some other? Is this an omnipresent feature, or a variable one? Where have I seen this before? Have I seen this before? Has anyone ever noticed this at all? (Answer: surprisingly often, no.) I think anyone who wants to be a better morphologist could improve their observational skills and anatomical understand through drawing; indeed, I can hardly imagine how it could be otherwise.
A slide from my introduction to anatomy lecture, from the section on how to study.
John Muir Laws is all about the practice of observing nature through drawing and writing notes, but the principles he teaches have much broader applications. Here are a couple of my favorite quotes of his:
“The first pancakes off the griddle are always funky, but you need to make them to get to the good pancakes. So too with drawing or journaling. Do not judge yourself by your first lines on paper on any given day.” – from “Sacrificial Pancakes”
When I first read that, I wrote to Mike, “Holy cow, did I need to read these lines, not just about drawing or writing but about LIFE.”
Mike responded, “Whether X is blog-posts, specimen drawings, novels, narrative songs or landscape paintings, the best _and quickest_ way to produce a good X is to produce a lot of bad Xs. Also: “sacrificial pancake” is a good term for the sequence of Bad Xs.”
The thing is, it’s not about the bad Xs, or even the good Xs. It’s about the willingness to keep making Xs at all. To wit:
“Drawing with the goal of the drawing itself makes a fetish of the product. […] Each drawing is not an end in itself. It is a vehicle to help you focus your attention.” – from “Quantity, not Quality”
The Laws Guide to Nature Drawing and Journaling is about doing that — learning to focus your attention by drawing and taking notes. I particularly like Laws’s 3-part structure to taking notes on something, be it a landscape, an organism, or a phenomenon. His guiding prompts are:
- “I notice…” What do you notice about the thing? Draw those things, write them down, annotate them — capture them somehow. The more you capture, the more you will likely notice.
- “I wonder…” Ask questions. They can be dumb questions, or unanswerable ones. The goal in the moment is not to filter, not to judge, just to let the ideas flow. As with pancakes, you may have to off-gas some dumb ideas into your notebook to get to the good ones.
- “It reminds me of…” Make connections. Again, without judgement. They can be far-fetched or goofy. You’ll have the rest of your life to sort the good from the bad — but only if you cast a broad enough net to catch the good ideas in the first place. Which is just another way of saying, lower your inner defenses to looking or feeling stupid. A lot of great ideas looked dumb at first blush.
That second quote resonates with me for another reason. I have the odd privilege of being friends with some of the world’s most accomplished paleoartists. If I started comparing my drawings to theirs, I’d never pick up a pen or pencil again. I’m like a goldfish watching a team of brain surgeons. But I’m not drawing for the same reasons they are. I basically only need to be able to do two things: take notes for my own personal use, and — occasionally — hand-draw something for publication. My first draft of the previous sentence included the formulation, “draw well enough to learn something”, but I realized that’s a nonsensical arrangement of words. I think that anyone at any level of skill or experience can draw well enough to learn something; indeed, a beginner may learn more from their first 10 drawings than a master will learn from their next 50.
And to circle back to the opening of the post, I don’t think aspiring paleontologists need to learn how to draw so that they can draw better. I think aspiring paleontologists need to learn how to draw so that they can see better. As Laws wrote, drawing is a vehicle for focusing attention. But the process of drawing has the handy corollary that it gives off archivable notes as waste.
A still from one of Laws’s videos on sketching.
Laws’s chosen field is natural history, but you could apply his ideas on noticing things, asking questions, making connections, and creating iteratively to all kinds of things: baking techniques, physical exercises, lawn mower engines, you name it. So a book with a seemingly specific remit, observing nature, actually is about becoming a better observer, and a better learner, in general. UPDATE: I should have thought to include this the first time around — Laws has just tons of great resources on his website, including a lot of freely-downloadable inserts and templates in the store to help with observation and drawing. One of them, the ruler sticker, is where I got the idea for affixing IKEA paper tapes to the cover of my research notebook.
Of all the books I’ve covered in this book week, if there’s one I could inflict on aspiring scientists — or active ones — and beg them to read and engage with, it would be this one. Not from any position of superiority! I am climbing the mountain myself, always, one day and one step at a time. This book is one of my hiking poles. I think you will find it useful as well.