When was the last time you picked up a pencil? Not to jot a to-do list or scribble a quick grocery reminder, but to really draw. And to let the world slow down for a moment while your hand translates what your eyes and heart are trying to make sense of.
This month, the Royal Drawing School celebrates its 25th anniversary with an online event that leans into that very idea. On September 24, 2025, three creative heavyweights: designer Sir Jony Ive KBE, illustrator Charlie Mackesy OBE, and museum director Tim Marlow OBE. The trio will sit down for Drawing Dialogues, a conversation about how drawing shapes their lives and work.
Why Drawing Still Matters
The School frames it eloquently: “Drawing is a way of seeing, thinking and understanding.”
For Jony Ive, whose name is forever linked to the sleek, world-changing devices at Apple, drawing is “an immediate expression of a thought… notes to myself giving body to an idea.” Those early iPhone sketches weren’t just design iterations.
Charlie Mackesy, the artist behind the tender “The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse”, describes drawing as medicine. “One of the best things for me about drawing is how it feels during the making of it, which is often better than the experience of finishing it.” Having read his book and seen its quiet impact on so many, I believe him.
And Tim Marlow, leading London’s Design Museum, has spent a career showing us how art and design intersect with life. His lens brings a wider cultural perspective: drawing not just as an act, but as a cornerstone of creative practice across industries.
At the Core of It All
I’ve been fortunate to take classes and workshops at the Royal Drawing School myself. I discovered it during Covid, when the art world seemed to collapse inward, and suddenly drawing felt like the most essential thing left. For artists, drawing isn’t just one medium among many, it’s the foundation, the place where seeing and thinking merge.
The quotes from these three creators really resonate because they get to something fundamental: the world fixates on the finished drawing, the thing AI can now mimic in seconds. But for artists, drawing has always been about the seeing, the thinking, the way ideas take shape through your hand. It’s about being able to look at the world and express dreams in a way that might inspire them to become real.
The Deep Joy of Being Seen
Drawing, at its heart, is communication in its purest form. Being able to look at someone’s work or have them moved by your own creates a connection that transcends words. I had a moment of this at a dinner recently where, unexpectedly, someone showed tremendous interest in my work. In that instant, I felt deeply seen; not just as a person making marks on paper, but as someone translating inner life into something shareable.
As I think about AI’s role in art, I keep coming back to what I enjoy without it: the thrill as the world moves faster, and the deep joy of when it moves slower. AI can generate a thousand images of a fox in seconds, but it can’t capture the moment when your hand discovers that the fox’s ear isn’t quite where you thought it was, and that discovery changes how you see every fox after.
Why This Event Matters
Maybe you’re a designer. Maybe you’re an artist. Or maybe, like so many of us, you’re just trying to find ways to be present in a hyper-accelerated world. Drawing offers that gift. Not just as a skill, but as a way of seeing, feeling, and slowing down long enough to really notice.
This event promises to remind us why drawing endures: because some forms of human expression can’t be rushed, replicated, or automated. They can only be lived.
As the Royal Drawing School celebrates 25 years, honoring the past, it also reminds us that drawing is both foundation and frontier. It sharpens how we see the present and gestures toward what lies ahead. Each mark carries us into a world still forming. For me, drawing is never just about the page, but about stepping into possibility — a practice the School has championed and one I am grateful to share in as an artist.