The thin black line

Life-drawing initiatives in schools; a new degree course; awareness campaigns. Sounds like the resurgence of a lost art. Pencils at the ready...

Lovers of craft, skill and tradition have reason to weep tears of joy this month. Drawing, that old-fashioned ability to co-ordinate hand and eye, is on the up and up again. Professor Deanna Petherbridge waxes lyrical about its virtues at the Royal College of Art. Camberwell College has successfully launched a new visual arts degree specialising in drawing. And this week at the Royal Academy, no fewer than two new drawing initiatives were launched.

Julien Spalding, the Master of the Guild of St George, that foundation established by the brilliant and bonkers John Ruskin - a man, incidentally, who drew almost every day of his life - lit a torch for "Drawing Power", a nationwide campaign for drawing which will reach its climax on 21 October when galleries and museums, stately homes, abbeys, and even that vile underpass at South Kensington which links the underground station with various museums, will all host enthusiastic sessions of public scribbling under the careful and informed tutelage of artists, designers and, according to the press release, mathematicians too. Young and old alike are invited. Pencils will be allowed - but not electronic calculators.

Spalding reminded us that drawing got going in Europe about 35,000 years ago when Man first tentatively put sharp implement to rock face. Why Europe though? "I think it must have been something about the air in France..." he quipped. "Drawing Power" has some powerful patrons - Quentin Blake, that dear, gentle man whose children's drawings are the envy of children the world over; and Gerald Scarfe, who recently did some work with Disney's animators - which proves, at a stroke, that even computers sometimes thirst for the human touch.

The second initiative, which has been quietly bearing fruit for a little over a decade, has been a nationwide campaign to bring life-drawing into schools, organised by the Royal Academy's Outreach programme since 1996 in conjunction with the Japanese company Yakult. Life-drawings from around the country, from as far afield as Northumberland and the Shetlands Isles, by children whose ages range from about six to 18, are on display in an exhibition called Alive! at the Royal Academy.

Think of the popular image of what happens at a life-drawing session. The nude model sits, marmoreal-still, the very embodiment of Perdita herself, for however long the artist requires her to do so - 10 minutes, half an hour or more. Then the omnipotent artist requests a different pose. She (he) yawns, stretches, and settles into passive immobility again. Was this what happened with the children? Not at all.

The day-long sessions, like the exhibition, itself were divided into different sections, allowing time to breathe think and even chat. The children sit in huge, ragged circles around the model, paper pressed to the floor, drawing with charcoal, that most shocking and forceful and immediate of mark-makers. At every stage the modelherself intervened - to describe poses, for example, or ways of thinking about a pose.

I asked one of the young artists, Kamiqua Pearce from Drayton Manor School, Ealing, how she'd found the session at the Pittshanger Museum. The first response was shock at seeing a nude human form - some of the kids giggled with embarrassment, but the embarrassment soon wears off. "When I came to examine it carefully and closely, the unclothed body looked so different from how I'd imagined," she said. The proportions were so different for a start. One of her two drawings in the show - this one can be found in a section called "narrative" - involved making an image which took as its starting point Gericault's The Raft of Medusa. The model showed images of the original, and told the story of the painting. She then struck various poses suggestive of the mood and atmosphere of characters in the raft, violently adrift upon a stormy sea - hope, despair, anger, resignation. In Kamiqua's energetic charcoal drawing, we see terrified human forms tumbling across each other, pitching, writhing, falling, full of the energy that was required to resist the overwhelming force of the waves.

The drawings on the show are most often large and expressive. This is a good thing, the encouragement to draw large, to find the freedom to be gained from using space and materials with a kind of wilful abandon. (Children, unless encouraged to do otherwise, often like to do small images in tight corners). Outreach day kept them thinking and pushing at the boundaries of what they thought themselves capable of doing.

In Kamiqua's second drawing, filed under "Gesture", she has been encouraged to draw quickly - each of the poses lasted for no more than about 20 minutes - and to set one pose in dynamic relationship with another, which is as much a test of memory as anything else. This was an exercise in representing dynamic interactions, movements of boldly gesturing bodies in space. Kamiqua had warmed to the challenge. "I'm quite a bold person myself," she said, grinning.

Boldness also requires imaginative intervention, and in a section entitled "Imagination", the children, having been told part of the story of Gore's The Third Way, are asked to complete the story by visualising scenes from it for themselves. They are encouraged to do imaginative drawings. They create tableaux by using their own bodies. The result is a kind of epitome of what good drawing should be - something which is faithful to the skills of the drawer, but mind-expanding, too; something which takes the drawer beyond his original conception of what he might have been capable of.

Camille Corot did something similar once, when he was painting beside a field. A passer-by looked over the artist's shoulder and, to his astonishment, he saw a pond. He pointed out that there was no pond within the artist's line of vision. Nonsense, said Corot. It is 10am on a hot day. I have been here all morning. I was getting thirsty. I needed that water. Or, as Picasso once said: "A picture is not made up beforehand. It follows the mobility of thought."

Alive, at the Royal Academy, Piccadilly, London W1 to 12 May