I started drawing at 30 for a specific reason that had nothing to do with wanting to make art. I had noticed that people who could draw — even badly — described the world in more specific ways than people who could not. They noticed things about faces, buildings, negative space. It was the noticing I wanted, not the drawing itself.
Three years in, I still draw badly by any objective measure. My proportions are off, my hands are terrible, most of what I make would not survive a peer review from a real illustrator. But the noticing has arrived, and it has been worth the whole exercise on its own. When I sit somewhere with my sketchbook out I actually look at what is in front of me — the angle of a person’s shoulders, the specific way a chair leg tapers, the shape of a shadow — in a way that I did not do before I started drawing.
The one rule that has kept me going: I never share what I draw. It is a private practice. That removed the entire pressure to be good, which turns out to be the pressure that had kept me from starting for a decade. The book that helped me most was Betty Edwards’s Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, which is old and slightly dated and still the best thing on the topic. If you have ever wanted to draw and quietly decided you could not, try that book with the shared-nothing rule. See what happens in three months.