In partnership with the Tate, The Times is promoting a traditional skill. It is inviting young artists between the ages of 11 and 18 to pick up their pencils and do a drawing. Enter a drawing of yourself and win the chance to see your work displayed at Tate Modern The weekend painter is too often treated as a figure of fun. We all recognise the cliché of the enthusiast with his portable easel and unfolding paint-box, his Thermos and sandwiches, his knotted handkerchief and damp socks. But professionals from Paul Gauguin to Grayson Perry have all been indebted to such humble beginnings. The former was a stockbroker and family man who for years could only dabble part-time in his artistic hobby. The latter proves that the skills of a suburban evening class can be lent a Turner prizewinning panache.

So sharpen your pencils. The great advantage of drawing is that you don’t need anything more sophisticated to begin. You don’t need studio space or stretched canvases or glamorous models. You can just start. Inspiration is everywhere. Rembrandt found it in his own face staring back from the mirror; Bonnard grew obsessed with his wife’s bottom; Van Gogh made do with his boots; and the American Jim Dine produced a whole series of drawings based on nothing more thrilling than his dressing gown.

Drawing, it seems, is a fundamental human response to the world. From the prehistoric animals scratched on to cave walls to the graffiti that Banksy stencils on to our modern-day streets, the instinct remains untempered. You only have to provide a toddler with a wax crayon to see it. The pleasure of drawing is universal: from the scrolling fluidity of Chinese brush and ink through the intricate complexities of Islamic manuscripts to the symbolic patterns of Australian Aborigines.

In Western art history, drawing has been fundamental to the development of our techniques, from the learning of perspective through the study of anatomy to the exploration of the creative freedoms pioneered by Modernism. Think of Jackson Pollock’s huge splatter fests, for instance. Are they really anything more than vast drawings that have gone on the rampage?

The idea of disegno was enshrined at the heart of the Renaissance. Think of that great Florentine perfectionist Michelangelo. His drawings are far more than merely preparatory studies. They are more than demonstrations of superlative proficiency. Line was the leash of Michelangelo’s imagination. His drawings reveal a mind at full stretch.

“Draw Antonio, draw, and don’t waste time,” he urged one of his pupils. The skills of the draughtsman, he knew, were the foundation of talent. And there have been many to agree. “Drawing is the probity of art,” declared the great NeoClassicist Ingres. “One must keep on drawing . . . Draw with your eyes when you cannot draw with a pencil.”

Or think of Picasso. His graphic powers lie at the core of his immense creativity. You can feel them like a skeleton supporting his vision. You can see them in series such as his magnificent Vollard Suite. These black lines unscrolling across the white paper may appear quite simple. But nothing in art – and least of all when it comes to Picasso – is ever black and white. These sheets are a symbolic labyrinth.

Even Monet, the famous colourist, was a draughtsman, it turns out. He may have worked hard to promote himself to the public as the supreme Modernist painter, as the great Impressionist translating the luminous world that fell on to his retina straight into shimmering paint, but (as a current exhibition at the Royal Academy shows) he in fact produced sketches and drawings and pastels throughout his career. They appear to have served in some way to define his vision. “Drawing is putting a line round an idea,” Matisse said.

It is only through drawing the world around us that we learn to see it. Sit down and start sketching something as basic as an apple, if you want to find out for yourself. See how quickly you are overwhelmed by the subtleties of shape, line and shadow.

Drawing need not be about the finished product. It can be about learning a certain type of attentiveness. “What is drawing?” asked Van Gogh. “It is working oneself through an invisible iron wall that seems to stand between what one feels and what one can do.”

“What I have not drawn I have never really seen,” declared Frederick Franck, the author of The Zen of Seeing. “And when I start drawing an ordinary thing I realise how extraordinary it is, sheer miracle.”

Now we live in the age of the camera. Where Hogarth, on suddenly spotting a face that fascinated him, would have made a quick pencil sketch (on his own thumb nail, often – the origin of the thumbnail sketch), today’s artist could more easily take a quick snapshot. But the type of seeing that you do when making a drawing is quintessentially different from that surveillance carried out by the electronic eye. It is not simply about recording, about capturing details. It is about trying to see how all these details interrelate.

Where the lens breeds a mood of detachment, drawing forges a sense of connection. “You learn a landscape by drawing it,” declared Dörer, “and you come to care for it with a lover’s devotion.”

Keith Haring believed: “Drawing is still basically the same as it has been since prehistoric times. It brings together man and the world. It lives through magic.” That is why drawing should still remain an important part of any art-school training. We may be living in the postWarholian world of the factory, in a time when the conceptual is fashionable and it is sufficient for an artist to come up with an idea and then leave it to his minions to put it into production, but the way of seeing that drawing fosters cannot be dismissed. Drawing brings us face to face with the wonder of the visible. It renders the world constantly fresh. It is the driving force of the new. And to practise it is not to remain imprisoned in academic convention. It is to point in the direction of the path that leads to freedom.

But drawing well is hard work. “It is only by drawing often, drawing everything, drawing incessantly, that one fine day you will discover that you have rendered something in its true character,” said Pissarro. There are many hours of heavy labour to be put in. Maybe this is why it is dropping from the art-school agenda. In an age of quick-fix solutions it looks like a long way round.

Leonardo believed that anyone with a modicum of ability could, with enough practice and discipline, learn to draw like him. But the amount of application he demanded was vast. And what about the weekend artist? Is it worth it? Will he ever make it?

Ruskin didn’t think that it mattered. To him it was just as important for young people to know and appreciate the art of others as to learn to make it themselves. Through struggling to learn to draw, he suggested, they would learn a greater respect for the art of the past.

So, it seems, that whatever your level of accomplishment, your efforts will not be wasted. Drawing is worth it, whether you go with Ruskin, who believed that “you cannot possibly draw the leafy crown of Melancholia too often”, or with Picasso, who thought that to draw you just had to “close your eyes and sing”.

How to enter The Tate Times Challenge

All entries must be drawn with pen, pencil or fixed charcoal on A4 paper only. Entrants must be between the ages of 11 and 18.

Before you begin, go to timesonline.co.uk/drawing and www.tate.org.uk/drawing for information on masterclasses and advice from the experts.

The closing date is Saturday, April 14. The best self-portraits will be chosen by our panel of judges, which includes the Turner prizewinner and Times columnist Grayson Perry, the Times chief art critic Rachel Campbell-Johnston, Anna Cutler, head of education at Tate Modern, Stephen Farthing, Professor of Drawing at Chelsea College of Art, and Joanne Bernstein, curator of the UBS collection.

The best entries will be included in a special display at Tate Modern during UBS Openings: The Long Weekend, an arts festival which runs from May 25-28.

Send entries to Tate Times Drawing Challenge, Communications Department, Tate, Millbank, London SW1P 4RG.

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