Cleaning up your headspace

I have been doing a mass declutter. I have thrown out a huge selection of pictures, drawings, papers, bills, and things I don't use. I am not even finished yet but there is now more room for us to live in our house.

How often is it that you think you know something about something and then when asked about it, well, you can't really define how it works. With drawing and painting for that matter, you will often need to return to the object of interest and re-look at it. Learning techniques to portray the surface of that object will help. If you were drawing a smooth sphere, you would not want to cross hatch unless the spaces between the hatch is very tight and gives an impression of smooth. Otherwise, a selection of shades, using the side of the charcoal may create the impression of smooth.

I guess what I am saying is that we all come with pre-conceived ideas about how some thing looks and is, when we haven't carefully observed it.

Also learning from others and reading about techniques and styles can give you new ideas for your own style of drawing.

Learn proportions of objects and don't be afraid to let your art appreciators imagine that there is an arm or leg beyond the border of the page edge, don't try to fit the whole image on the page, especially if working on a smaller scale.

I recently recieved an email from American Artist who run a site called Artist Daily, I get little clues on creating from them. I recently saw an artist's work that uses simple strokes to create the most amazing short sketches. This just reminds me to keep it simple, to draw in solid shapes to capture the essence of the figure.

Now all I have to do, is actually get it right myself. I have had lots of experience drawing, but I am still learning. It is just a journey.

Smoke and Mirrors

Hi,

I decided to start this blog for anyone to read about the ideas behind drawing and how to gain the skills to do so. I will also be talking about other art forms, my fears, frustrations, and discoveries about them. But mostly it'll be about drawing.

I have spent my whole life drawing. From early childhood, images were a great mode to communicate and to this day I can still draw. Most people will say that it comes down to natural ability, or giftedness. I think that this "ability" presides over all of us and is very present.

Drawing can be learnt,  and this is the great part. You all have the tools to do this. You will need:

• A pair of eyes 
• A brain
• and a bunch of digits - Hands preferably but toes might do.
• and a few simple drawing tools which can be found at home, pens, pencils, sharpeners, paper and some time.
• A desire to learn to draw
• Patience to keep perservering.

So you think I am nuts? I probably am but I also know that people stop believing in themselves when they grow up. Nothing is perfect, no one is ever happy with how they look, but have you actually really looked? This is something that I think is the key to gaining understanding and drawing. Looking.

You can try to draw something but without actually looking at it, it will not come out as descriptive or convincingly. Funny thing is that looking is an art and a skill that needs to be learnt. I am part of a group of artists (novice to advanced) and I work alongside them to help them to become better at looking. This is called Co-constructing and is a theory developed by a man called Lev Vygotsky. What this means is that learning cannot occur entirely in isolation and that other people can show and teach you things that you never thought about.

So here's a task. This is one of the very first tasks I ever did at university level illustration classes. Take a paper, and using lines (if you can write or scribble you can do this), draw a traffic light. Then take your drawing, and go and find an actual traffic light, and look at the shapes, the dimensions, the height, the angles and the wires. Did you draw them? Does it really look the way you drew the traffic light? Probably not.

What this shows you is that your perception of what an item should look like usually is very different from what it actually looks like. So the first lesson for today is never assume that you know what something looks like until you really look at it closely. It may be more different than you think!