The brain is a forgetting machine

Imagine you’re in a drawing class.

Your pencil flows across the paper, and suddenly, it all makes sense. The proportions look right, the shading actually resembles the model, and you feel like you’re ‘getting it!’

You pack up your supplies with quiet confidence, already daydreaming about the drawings you’ll make at home next week.

Then life gets busy. A week later, you finally sit down to draw again, excited to pick up where you left off. You sharpen your pencil, study your subject, and… nothing.

The connection is gone. The techniques that seemed so natural have vanished. You’re not just rusty, you feel like you’re starting entirely from scratch.

It’s as if everything you learned has slipped away.

You’re not alone.

You’ve just run into one of the most common experiences in learning: the forgetting curve.

What is the forgetting curve?

The concept of the forgetting curve is often cited to German psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus.

Ebbinghaus wanted to measure how quickly memory fades over time.

To test this, he set himself a rather unusual challenge: memorising strings of random letters and symbols. By using nonsensical material instead of words or stories, he removed personal associations that could help recall. This gave him a clearer picture of how memory works in its most neutral form.

“Among many thousand combinations there occur scarcely a few dozen that have a meaning and among these there are again only a few whose meaning was realised while they were being memorised. –  Memory: A Contribution to Experimental Psychology

You can see an English translation of his original paper here: Memory: A Contribution to Experimental Psychology

Here are some of Ebbinghaus’s data points about the rate of memory retention.

• After 20 minutes: 40% retained
• After 1 hour: 44% retained
• After 9 hours: 36% retained
• After 1 day: 34% retained
• After 2 days: 28% retained
• After 6 days: 25% retained

The speed of forgetting slows over time, which is why it forms a curve, but the overall loss is dramatic. After just six days, he had forgotten nearly 90% of the new material.

No wonder a weekly art club can feel like you are always starting from the beginning; in many ways, you are.

So what can you do about it? How can you retain your new drawing skills before the forgetting curve sweeps them away?

Is there a better way?

Anyone can watch a tutorial and understand a concept, such as looking for and identifying negative spaces rather than positive forms. But if you want that knowledge to move from short-term memory into long-term memory, you need practice and repetition.

Now this doesn’t need to be a large-scale, super-rendered drawing.

Far from it.

Little and often is the way to go.

Say you finished a one-hour drawing class at 10 am. If you spend just five minutes that evening repeating one of the exercises, you give your brain a boost in information retention.

The best way to reinforce the teachings isn’t to go back and rewatch the lesson; it’s to try to remember what you learnt earlier.

Ask yourself: What were the key points? What was the main concept? What new phrase stood out?

This is when your brain starts working harder. You will make mistakes, and that is part of the process.

According to Ebbinghaus, you’ve already forgotten nearly 50% after the first hour, but I find knowing that can be empowering!

You’re not trying to remember everything.

Just something.

This practice is called ‘Active Recall’

What is active recall?

Active recall is trying to remember what you’ve learnt without referring back to the original information.

Let’s go back to that morning drawing session. If you had watched a tutorial and done the exercise. Then take a break. Come back to the lesson a few minutes or few hours later and try to recreate what you’ve learnt only from memory.

Don’t look at the original material, try to recall what you’ve studied

You might stumble with your answer, or you might go completely blank.

By practising spaced repetition and active recall, these ‘gaps” or the sections or methods you don’t remember, may be the key to your long-term progress.

What is spaced repetition?

Spaced repetition is the practice of revisiting the same subject again and again, but at carefully timed intervals. Think of it as working with the forgetting curve instead of against it. You wait until the memory starts to fade, then use active recall to bring it back, which strengthens it each time.

In the 1980s, Polish scientist Piotr Wozniak built on his ideas around spaced repetition and created a program called SuperMemo. It was one of the first tools to use spaced repetition for memory training. Here’s how it worked:

1. You build a database of questions and answers.
2. When you study, the program shows you a question to review.
3. After answering, you rate how easy it was to remember (0 = very hard, 5 = very easy).
4. The software calculates when to show that question again.

Tricky questions appear more often, while easier ones are pushed further apart.

This way, you spend your energy on the concepts you are struggling with, rather than repeatedly reviewing things you already know.

For artists, this approach can be especially helpful. You will often notice that the areas you keep revisiting are the very ones that lead to breakthroughs in your drawing.

“This software (Supermemo) adjusted review schedules based on user performance, predicting when a memory was about to fade and prompting recall before it was lost. By grounding his work in the mathematics of the forgetting curve, Wozniak turned a theoretical model into a digital learning system” – The Decision Lab

How to practice spaced repetition

So short warm-up sketches really can help. Small poster studies of your own paintings can jog your memory to what you’re looking for.

These memory lessons are great for remembering concepts and principles of drawing. You can also train your visual memory, which is a whole skill in itself!

Try exercises like:

• Drawing a familiar object from memory without looking at the paper
• Timed gesture sketches that force you to capture shapes quickly
• Redrawing simple forms from earlier studies to see what you can recall

When you think about it, every drawing is an act of memory. You cannot look at your subject and the paper at the same time, so you are constantly recalling what you just saw.

How do you create your own drawing study set?

A couple of popular apps are Anki and Quizlet, which allow you to create your own study flashcards and have timed tests. Here are a few questions you could add to cards.

Drawing Fundamentals Flashcards

Line
Q: What is the difference between contour lines and gesture lines?
A: Contour lines describe edges and outlines. Gesture lines capture movement, flow, and energy.

Shape
Q: What is the difference between positive and negative shapes?
A: Positive shapes are the subject. Negative shapes refer to the spaces surrounding and between subjects.

Value
Q: Why is value more important than colour in realistic drawing?
A: Value shows light and shadow, which creates form and depth.

Proportion
Q: What is the “sighting” method in drawing?
A: Using your pencil or thumb at arm’s length to measure and compare relative sizes or angles.

Perspective
Q: What does one-point perspective mean?
A: All parallel lines recede to a single vanishing point on the horizon.

Gesture
Q: What is the main purpose of gesture drawing?
A: To capture movement, rhythm, and energy quickly, not detail.

Composition
Q: What is the rule of thirds?
A: Dividing the picture plane into a 3×3 grid and placing key elements along the lines or intersections.

Form
Q: How do you turn a flat circle into the illusion of a sphere?
A: Add shading and a light source: highlight, mid-tones, core shadow, reflected light, cast shadow.

Observation
Q: What is the value of “looking more than drawing”?
A: Careful observation ensures accuracy. Drawing without looking leads to guesswork.

Hope this helps,

Have a good weekend and week ahead,

Will