As so many immigrants expats around the world, I like to follow the news regarding what's happening back in my home country. But getting complete, reliable information has been getting more and more difficult every year, and 2020 is the year in which I finally ran out of news sources.

Unlike my parent's generation, I don't consider newspapers a reasonable source of reliable information. The problem is that, following the example set by Fox News, the largest newspapers at home have substituted fact for opinions, extremely biased articles, and outrage has replaced objectivity as the main selling point. All of this seasoned with local celebrity gossip, of course.

If despite my best judgment I decide to check what's going on based on newspapers, I currently start with the biggest newspaper (which is very right-leaning) and then compensate with their main opposition (which is, as expected, very left-leaning). I then figure out which news are common to both, and decide which version is more likely to be true - one newspaper's fair trial is the other newspaper's witch hunt, and one newspaper's smart move is the other newspaper's national betrayal. Finally, I check which news have been mentioned in only one of them, and decide on a reasonable narrative for why only one of them is talking about it. Suffice to say, doing this in the morning on my phone takes a lot of effort.

In my case, this was one problem (probably the only one) solved by the news aggregator Reddit. The sub-reddit for my country used to be relatively good at highlighting the main issues in the public conscience, and reading the main posts used to be enough to get a good, updated picture. But not anymore: extremely lax moderation and general apathy have turned the forum into a meme-laden wasteland where all information has been replaced by bad jokes, political outrage, and the occasional "kill all poors" post. So I quit it for good, and haven't looked back.

Which leads me to today. I have not yet found any source of news that I can trust to inform me. Sure, I can easily get distracted, entertained, outraged, tricked, and lied to, but informed? Good luck with that. I have remained uninformed for a couple months now, and I don't see that changing anytime soon.

Being a programmer who has spent a bit of time toying around with NLP, I have been working on a solution - a small news aggregator where I can get a proper sense of what's going on. But it hasn't been easy: news agencies no longer offer RSS feeds, important data is locked behind proprietary formats made intentionally hard to read, and there is barely any corpora around in Spanish that I could use to train models.

I don't have a deeper point. I can't promise that my solution will work, because it's entirely possible that it never makes it out of vaporware. I don't have a website to recommend, because websites are getting bad faster than good ones are propping up. And I'm not going to talk about the cesspool that are unmoderated forums because we all know about that already.

I just wanted to say: I am very unhappy with this situation.

I am okay at drawing. That means: I am probably better at drawing than a random person walking down the street but I'm far, far behind the type of artists that regularly post in Instagram. I am also mostly self-taught: I took some initial lessons via mail from the well-known (at the time) Modern Schools, gave up for a couple years, and picked it back up in my late teens when I needed something to do besides programming and not having friends. Some of my drawings have been published, and one in particular has been stolen countless time by people who thinks copying things from the internet without attribution is fine.

I was recently asked what I would recommend to someone who wants to learn how to draw. This question took me by surprise for two reasons: one, because I was never asked this before, and two, because my answer was surprisingly useless even to me:

Any tutorial you find online will give you the right steps. But you'll only understand them after you already know how to draw.

This is a pointless answer, which also happens to be 100% correct. This post is my attempt at giving a slightly clearer answer, explaining why anyone would think that my advice makes sense and hopefully give beginners some good points on where to start.

Note 1: this post contains links to drawings of naked people. If you are not comfortable with drawn nudity, you should probably not follow the links and definitely reconsider whether figure drawing is good for you.

The boring advice

All drawing is, at its core, more or less the same. Whether you are interested into realistic drawing, comic drawing, manga drawing (a term I hate), webcomics or editorial cartoons, the art of representing human figures in 2D is based on 90% the same rules. Sure, US comics have more muscles and japanese manga characters have no nose, but the fundamentals are the same. A typical drawing curriculum should include:

• How to sketch a human figure. This guide is relatively good, while this one sucks for reasons I'll explain later on. If you've seen those wooden figures, they are useful for getting the hang of this step.
• The proportions of the human body. More specifically, this guide on how many heads you need to draw a full body.
• The proportions of the face. This is annoying enough that it often warants a section on its own.
• How perspective works. One, two, and three points perspective are the typical ones.
• How shadows work. Getting it perfect will take a long time, but "dark part is dark" will get you far with little effort.

Once you reach this point, you can either start learning about muscles and improve your anatomy (have you ever stopped to think about how weird knees look?), or become a caricaturist and call it a day.

The number of books and tutorials out there convering all these points is virtually infinite, and therefore any book you choose it's going to be probably fine. If you want some more specific advice, multiple generations of artists have learned with Andrew Loomis' books, which are freely available on the Internet Archive. You should start with Figure drawing for all it's worth, follow up with Drawing the head and hands, and fresh up your perspective with the first half of Successful drawing.

Practical advice I: Keep drawing

There are two extra pieces of advice worth discussing.

The standard advice says "keep drawing until you become good at it", which is technically true but only barely. The full, honest version should say:

Start with one drawing. It will suck, and that's fine. Once you're finished, look at it objectively and enumerate its defects. For your next drawing, focus on solving those defects. Repeat until you consider yourself good enough¹.

In other terms: you can draw circles all day and all night for years, but that won't make you any better at drawing squares. If you want to get better at drawing, you first need to be aware of what's there to improve.

That doesn't mean that you can't be happy about something you just drew. Few things are as rewarding as putting your art supplies to the side, looking at your drawing, and admiring something knowing that you made it. All I'm saying is: you need to know what your blind spots are. If you are like me and your eyes are always sliiiiightly out of alignment, it is perfectly fine to still be happy about that portrait you just made. But if you are not honest and accept that yes, that one eye looks weird, then you will never learn how to fix it².

Practical advice II: Copy other people

As the quote goes, "Good artists copy, great artists steal". Therefore, it is your duty as aspiring artist to copy as much as you can. Most self-taught artists I know started the same way, copying drawings over and over until they felt comfortable enough to start doing their own.

My suggestion: find an artist you like. Pick one of their drawings and copy it. Add the final work to your sketch folder. Repeat. This exercise serves several purposes:

• It will improve your pencil grip, make your lines stronger, and improve your technique overall.
• It allows you to focus on a sub-part of the problem (drawing a figure) without having to worry about the complicated stuff - you don't need to think about perspective, shadows or posture because the artist already did it for you.
• It helps you to build your personal portfolio. It will help you visualize your progress, and gives you something to brag about whenever someone learns you are drawing and asks you to see something you've done. Plus, it's not like you wanted to throw those drawings away, right?
• It will help you answer questions you didn't know you had. Do you want to know how to draw a feminine-looking nose? Copy one of Phil Noto's illustrations. Would you like to know how does a professional go from zero to done? You can watch professionals like Jim Lee do a couple pieces in real time online and even explain their process as they go. Are you wondering how much attention to pay to clothes and background? Once you notice that classical painters couldn't care less about whatever is below your shoulders, maybe you won't lose your sleep about it either.

Eventually, you'll start noticing that different artists have different skills to offer. Maybe that guy draws cool hands, that other artist draws clothes very well, and that third other one has very expressive faces. Copying their work helps you understand the tricks they are using, and adding them to your repertoire helps you develop your own style.

Rest of the owl

The final point is both super important and really difficult to explain to beginners.

Are you familiar with the how to draw an owl meme? This picture is very popular in amateur art circles because it goes straight to the core issue: that most tutorials will take your hand and guide you step-by-step, but then they will let go at a critical step and you'll fall down a metaphorical cliff.

The root of the problem, I think, is that one step where the book tells you to "do what feels natural" or to "just keep going". What these people forget, however, is that learning what feels natural takes a lot of practice!

This tutorial I mentioned above is as bad as it gets: the instructions tell you to "Draw some vertical and horizontal lines to plan your drawing", which is completely useless advice that only makes sense once you know which lines to draw and where. Whoever wrote that guide has forgotten what it was to be a beginner, and their advice is really not helping.

When that happens, you have two choices. You can look for a better tutorial, or you can keep going, and see how far you make it. There is no shame in trying and failing, and who knows? maybe you'll still make it. Truth be told, there is a point at which no tutorial can help you and all that's left for you to do is to just draw. But that only applies for specific, advanced tutorials. It is the sad truth that, as a beginner, you will often recognize bad tutorials only once you are stuck in them.

Nobody said the life of an artist was easy.

Closing remarks

This guide ended up being longer than I intended, and half as long as it should be. That's always going to be a problem: the average artist does not let structure get in the way of their vision, and any attempt at a "formal" answer will stop halfway (as I have complained before). That said, if you would still appreciate a more structured approach, I have heard good things about Betty Edward's book Drawing on the right side of the brain.

And finally: have fun. All of this advice is useful for when you want to get objectively better, but there's a lot to be said in favor of simply drawing because you enjoy it.

Happy drawing!

Footnotes

1. Fair warning: in my experience, most artists never feel that they are "good enough". This is a well-known bug of art.

2. I believe the process of "find defect, correct defect, repeat" is why most artists I know are never happy about their work. Seriously, go to an artist and tell them you like a particular drawing of them - there's a good chance that they'll give some excuse for why the drawing sucks.

I have been giving programming languages a lot of thought recently. And it has ocurred to me that the reason why (reportedly) lots of people fail at learning how to program is because they are introduced to it at entirely the wrong level.

If you as a beginner search "Python tutorial" right now, you will get lots of very detailed, completely correct, very polished tutorials that will teach you how to program in Python, but that will not teach you how to program. Conversely, if you search for "how to program", the first results will be either completely useless advice such as "decide what you would like to do with your programming knowledge" or they ask you to choose a programming language. You might choose Python, in which case you are now back to square one.

One of the founding principles of my field is that "Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes". In other words, programming is a skill that it's expressed typicall using programming languages, but it's not exclusively about them. And programming, the skill underlying all of these programming languages, is hard.

To be a good programmer, you need to master three related skills:

1. Understand how to convert messy real-life problems into a clearer version with less ambiguities.
2. Understand what the best practical approach to this problem is, and choose one as a possible solution.
3. Understand how to use programming languages and data structures to implement that solution.

Mastering the first skill requires an analytical mind, and in particular forces you to see the world in a different way. If someone asks you for a program to keep track of how many people are inside a room, you need to stop thinking in terms of people and rooms and think in terms of numbers and averages. You also need to account for badly-defined situations: if a woman gives birth inside the room, is your solution good enough to increase the room count by one?

This part alone is quite hard. Some people make a living out of it as software requirements engineers, meeting with clients and discussing some approaches that would make sense. It also requires at least a surface level understanding of the type of solutions that one could realistically employ. If you ever wondered why your high-school math teacher always asked you to turn apples and trains into equations and solving for x, well, this is why: they were teaching you how to solve real-world problems with simpler methods.

In order to master the second skill "choose a viable solution", you need to read a lot about which problems are easy and which ones are hard. There are some problems that a programmer solves daily, and some problems for which the best known solution would still take thousands of years. If you think that finding new solutions to problems is interesting, I encourage you to go knock at the Math department of your nearest university. They do this for a living, and will be very excited to have you around.

Finally, the third and last skill "implement a solution" requires you to write it down in a way that computers can understand. Half the job requires understanding common concepts for structuring programs (variables, databases, data structures, networks, and so on), and the other half requires learning the syntax of your preferred programming language.

And here we reach the core of this post's answer. If you type "Python tutorial" right now, what you'll get are very detailed guides on how to acquire the second half of the third skill, also known as "the unimportant one". Sure, programmers love discussing which programming language is better and how not to write code, but here's a little secret: in the larger scale of things, it rarely matters. Some programming languages are better suited for specific tasks, true, but the best programming language is not going to be of any help if you don't know what you are trying to build.

At its core, programming is learning how to solve problems with a specific set of tools. And while you do need to understand how to use those tools, they are completely useless if no one explains to you how to solve problems with them. If knowing how to use a pen doesn't make you a writer, and knowing how to use a wrench doesn't make you a mechanic, teaching you a programming language and expecting you to become a programmer overnight is just going to leave you confused and frustrated. But remember: it's not you, it's them.

Appendix I: what does problem solving looks like?

Let's say someone asks me to "write a program to know who I have been in contact with in any given day", a problem known as contact tracing that has been in the news in the past weeks. How would the skills above come into play?

(Note: for the sake of simplicity, I am going to solve this problem badly. It's a toy example, so don't @ me!)

The first step is to model this situation in a formal, more structured way. Real people are difficult to work with, but luckily we don't care about most things that make them human - all we care about is where they have been at any point in time. Therefore, we replace those real people with "points", keep track of their GPS coordinates at all times, and throw all of their remaining attributes away.

We have now turned our problem into "tell me which GPS coordinates (i.e., points) have been close to my GPS coordinates at any given time". We can simplify the problem further by defining what "close to me" means, and we turn the problem into "give me a list of points that have been 1 meter or closer to me at any given time".

Next, we need to find a way to efficiently identify which points have been close enough to our coordinates. Since there is a lot of people in the world, we start by crudely removing all points that are more than 10km. away from me - this can be done very quickly, and it probably won't affect our results too badly.

We now need to refine our search, and therefore we take a dive into the geometry literature. After a quick look, I decided that building a Quadtree is the best solution for what I want to build. Note that I only have a passing knowledge of what Quadtrees are, but that's fine: once I have a hint of where the solution might be, I can search further and learn the details as I go.

And finally we get down to writing code. If our programming language doesn't already include an implementation of a Quadtree data structure, we might have to do it ourselves. If we choose Python, for instance, we need to understand how to create a class, how to use lists of objects, and all those other implementation details that our Python tutorial has taught us. Similarly, storing the list of points will probably require a database. Each database has a different strong point but, as I said earlier, knowing which database to use is not as important as knowing that some database is the right tool.

Let's now picture the same exercise in revers: imagine I come to you and say "Write me a program to know who I have been in contact with in any given day. Here's a guide on how to use Quadtrees in Python". You wouldn't find that last bit of any use, would you?