...if you asked random people on the street if they'd like to be able to draw like Leonardo, you'd find most would say something like "Oh, I can't draw." This is more a statement of intention than fact; it means, I'm not going to try. Because the fact is, if you took a random person off the street and somehow got them to work as hard as they possibly could at drawing for the next twenty years, they'd get surprisingly far. But it would require a great moral effort; it would mean staring failure in the eye every day for years. And so to protect themselves people say "I can't."

-- Paul Graham

and now, some words from a clown with a pencil:

Unless constrained by physical limitations "I can't" is no more than the first two words of the longer phrase "I can't be bothered". I'm repeating this to myself a dozen time a day at the moment.

Drawing anything I don't tear up in disgust is still hard for me - the divide between intent and execution has never seemed greater than it is right now - but that won't stop me drawing.

I was always told "draw what you see" without anyone bothering to explain what that ~meant~. Hopefully plugging away I'll learn a phrase that'll act as a better artistic roadsign for myself and others. Right now I'm at just the stage of "teach your hands how to copy what you visualise".