Levelling up Art
I'm kind of blown away by this.
Today, I went to a meetup - a really good, fun place. Several people were doing crafts, a couple of people were drawing. I'd forgotten to bring anything, and a friend said 'hey, I have pen and paper if you want'.
Before going to this meetup, I'd have declined. Since then, I've started to mess with pen and paper anyway; but hesitantly and feeling I was struggling with very simple things.
Fast forward over the summer: new graphics tablet, Manga Studio, the photoshop grunge course (which still has *a lot* of stuff to offer), a fair bit of practice (I've been drawing _something_ most days, even if it's just a five-minute sketch). And thus, when pen and paper were available to me today, I started searching my iPad for photos and began to sketch.
And, yeah, none of this is Great Art, but most of the sketches turned out to be ok, including the human figure - my first human figure! . I noticed that I wasn't overly bothered about being rubbish at drawing, that my pencil handling was fairly loose and relaxed - and that the lines mostly went where I wanted them to be. All of this is much, much improved over the past.
Maybe the most important thing to take away is that what I'm doing *works*. I may not be pursuing a traditional progression of 'this skill before that, practice this thing twenty times before doing the next one' but rather chasing low-handing fruit of 'do this thing that makes you feel competent and that lets you have fun' while trying to understand the bigger picture and experimenting with every possible tool and technique. Every one of them is teaching me _something_, and many of those _somethings_ will translate to other stuff. (Image manipulation, for instance, is much more fun if you use a variety of brushes to transform images and edit masks instead of relying on a filter).
So yes. Sat in public, did art, did not feel inadequate, did not feel like an impostor.
WIN.
Also posted at http://green-knight.dreamwidth.org/1059466.html where it has gathered
comments. If you're reading at both sites, I'd prefer comments at DW.
Today, I went to a meetup - a really good, fun place. Several people were doing crafts, a couple of people were drawing. I'd forgotten to bring anything, and a friend said 'hey, I have pen and paper if you want'.
Before going to this meetup, I'd have declined. Since then, I've started to mess with pen and paper anyway; but hesitantly and feeling I was struggling with very simple things.
Fast forward over the summer: new graphics tablet, Manga Studio, the photoshop grunge course (which still has *a lot* of stuff to offer), a fair bit of practice (I've been drawing _something_ most days, even if it's just a five-minute sketch). And thus, when pen and paper were available to me today, I started searching my iPad for photos and began to sketch.
And, yeah, none of this is Great Art, but most of the sketches turned out to be ok, including the human figure - my first human figure! . I noticed that I wasn't overly bothered about being rubbish at drawing, that my pencil handling was fairly loose and relaxed - and that the lines mostly went where I wanted them to be. All of this is much, much improved over the past.
Maybe the most important thing to take away is that what I'm doing *works*. I may not be pursuing a traditional progression of 'this skill before that, practice this thing twenty times before doing the next one' but rather chasing low-handing fruit of 'do this thing that makes you feel competent and that lets you have fun' while trying to understand the bigger picture and experimenting with every possible tool and technique. Every one of them is teaching me _something_, and many of those _somethings_ will translate to other stuff. (Image manipulation, for instance, is much more fun if you use a variety of brushes to transform images and edit masks instead of relying on a filter).
So yes. Sat in public, did art, did not feel inadequate, did not feel like an impostor.
WIN.
Also posted at http://green-knight.dreamwidth.org/1059466.html where it has gathered
comments. If you're reading at both sites, I'd prefer comments at DW.