Using Anki to learn drawing

updated May 29, 2026

This one is still more aspiration than practice. I haven’t run a serious drawing deck the way I have with kanji or algorithm problems. But the principle is the same one that lets Anki work for a physical skill at all: a card does not have to ask you to recall a fact, it can ask you to perform an action. A drawing card is a prompt to do a thing (draw a hand from this reference, do twenty gesture sketches) and the rating is an honest self-assessment of how it went. The recognition half that Anki is so good at maps onto the visual vocabulary of drawing: the parts of perspective, the proportions of the figure, the major muscles, the way light falls on a form. The doing half, the hand-eye motor skill, Anki can only schedule, not teach, the same limit I hit with speaking a language.