Learning to Draw

I've been getting more and more requests as a "front end developer" to do design work (logos, whole web sites, or just little buttons). This isn't the most comfortable position for me. The last drawing class that I took was in college and I've never had any kind of training in graphic design. I typically just mess with photoshop and steal from other sites until I have something that looks good.

The more I talk to other developers about this, the more it seems that they're being put in a similar position: because we turn photoshop files into web pages, we're being asked to turn ideas into photoshop files. It doesn't help that most of us know how to use photoshop; the real problem is that we don't know the fundamentals of graphic design. This isn't to say that I don't want to do graphic design. I'm jealous when I see some of the beautiful, innovative, designs that just the designers in my Twitter network come up with. I want to know when to shade something one way or another or why a shadow looks good here or there.

But how?

Well, I've come up with a few ideas, one of which I'm planning to throw my weight behind (guess).

1. Formal classes: there are dozens of schools in the DC area and many of them have graphic design programs ranging from the uber-expensive corcoran college of art and design and Center for Digital Imaging Arts at BU (CDIA) to the cheapo courses at the usda grad school.
2. Self taught: I learned almost everything I know about programming from books and on the job, why not do the same with graphic design? Grab a bunch of books, sit at home sketching, and cruise the web for inspiration and tutorials. The problem with this one is the same self-motivation issue that keeps most of us from doing Rosetta Stone to learn Mandarin when we all know we'll need it sooner or later. There are much more interesting and short-sighted things to do at home... like blog about wishing you knew graphic design fundamentals.
3. Social Network School (hint: this is the one I like): I had this idea yesterday when I twittered about looking at CDIA and had a few other developers respond that they were interested in something similar. What about gathering ten+ developers together who have a similar interest in basic graphic design fundamentals and then finding designers to come in to teach us? We could either pay them back in trade (i.e. show us how to draw circles and we'll help build that site you designed and could never find a developer for) or just use *shudder* money to entice them. I know that my twitter network is oozing with design talent and developer talent. There's not reason that we can't organize ourselves to teach. There will be challenges: keeping things consistent, scheduling, maintaining quality without sacrificing the informal nature of the proposition - but, like any bugs, these can probably be fixed in the first few iterations (yay, developer speak).

So, I'm planning to try to organize #3. It won't be dissimilar to a gathering I've been doing with friends to teach each other about random things that we know or want to know, except that I'm hoping it will be more formal and focused week to week. I'll report back on progress, but probably set up another site.

Thoughts out there? Anyone heard of something like this already? Does this crappy blog I built even allow commenting?