Journal /
Illustration
Why we draw the same doorway five times
Repetition sounds dull. In a sketchbook it is the fastest way to stop drawing what you think a door looks like and start drawing the one in front of you.
On the first evening of every drawing course I ask people to pick a doorway on their street and draw it five times. Not five doors. One door, five times, ideally in one sitting. There is always a polite silence, and then someone asks the obvious question: why would you draw the same thing twice, let alone five times?
The honest answer is that the first drawing is never of the door. It is a drawing of your idea of a door: a rectangle, a handle, maybe a step. It is the symbol you learned as a child, and it is very good at getting in the way.
The first drawing is a guess
When you draw something for the first time your hand moves faster than your eyes. You draw what you expect to find. The arch comes out too round, the frame too thin, the step too shallow. None of that is a mistake in skill. It is a mistake in looking, and looking is what the next four drawings are for.
By the second pass most people notice one thing they got wrong: the door is narrower than they thought, or the fanlight sits higher. By the third they start measuring with their pencil held at arm’s length. By the fourth they slow down, and by the fifth they speed up again, because now they know the door.
“By the fifth drawing you are no longer drawing a door. You are drawing that door, the one with the crooked hinge and the brass letter box.”
What changes between drawings
I ask students to keep all five on one page, side by side, so the changes are easy to see. The shapes get simpler and truer. The shadows go in the right places. The line itself changes too: early lines are hairy and cautious, later lines are single and sure. That confidence is not talent. It comes from having already met the problem four times.
Five passes at the same door on Park Row, Bristol. The fifth took four minutes.
It also teaches you to edit. A doorway is full of detail, and the first drawings try to include all of it. By the end people leave out the bricks they do not need and keep the three that explain the wall.
There is a practical side to this too. Buildings repeat themselves: windows in rows, railings in runs, bricks in courses. Once you have drawn one doorway properly, the next one on the street goes down twice as fast, because you already understand how the frame meets the wall and where the shadow falls under the lintel.
Students often tell me the exercise changed how they walk home. They start noticing which doors have been painted recently, which steps are worn in the middle, which fanlights still have their original glass. That attention is the real skill. The drawing is just the record of it.
Try it this week
Choose a door you pass every day. Give yourself twenty minutes and an A5 page. Draw it five times, each one a little quicker than the last, and do not rub anything out. Then put the page away for a day and look at it again. The first drawing will tell you what you assumed. The fifth will tell you what was there.
Bring the page to your first class if you join us. It is the best introduction to how you see that I know of, and it only costs a pencil.
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Drawing buildings from life
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