“I really couldn’t draw the way I needed to draw. So I started drawing again from plaster casts, trying to really represent what was in front of me. To try to get that thing from the eye to the brain to the hand fluid and working. I did that for almost two years. It helped me enormously, because I knew that if I could get past it I wouldn’t have to do it anymore. If you can achieve that fluidity at a level of academic understanding, you can then push it aside. But there’s no way to push it aside without going through it. The great lesson you learn is there’s no shortcut to learning how to draw expressionistically, or inventively, except to first draw academically. You can’t bypass that process.
First you play the scales. The scales are not music yet. But eventually, when you can make your fingers move the way the brain wants them to, the possibility of music occurs.”
— Milton Glaser (via Graphis #331)