CHANGE OF SEASON & MY DRAWING JOURNEY

Nov 03, 2017 14:36

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Trying to rake leaves, I’ve got too much, damp, dark end of day, I’m mad and got one more pile to drag.   Something causes me to look down the street.  Here was a cat laid out on the road, fresh kill, I didn’t know.  Very fresh.  So I dropped the rake and ran to the road before the next car.  The cat had not been run over yet and just had a small amount of blood around the head or mouth.  I touched him and nothing.  I’ve head of horror stories of trying to help wounded animals off the road and had gotten nailed.  He didn’t move.  I thought he was dead, so I gently pulled him off the road to the grass.  And I had to pull because he was a hefty cat.  Sadly he was still warm and not breathing.   Wish I had vet training. And that’s who I would owe if he had been alive and I had taken him out.   I felt for heart and could not feel anything.  Poor thing.  Nothing I could do.  I went back later and his back end and legs were getting cold.  Our first cat ran straight into a hubcap of a passing truck and broke it’s back.  Dragged itself off the road with two front paws.  She had to be put to sleep.  I think this is what happened to this one.

Banked yellow leaves curved  a torn yellow tree
Blond Lab,  red semi, summers gone,
Cold icy rain, Burrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr!

HOW I GOT GOING IN DRAWING

If your like me (and no one probably starts out as light and frozen solid as I did) be happy that you are not - you probably can get started much quicker! From the beginning you want to do pictures so you have work to keep and show - something that you have done! Do pictures you can keep. You can stop right there and just do pictures, not feel you need to progress. You probably don’t need or want to develop further. Some people are already set to go! But if you feel you might want to flow more naturally while you are drawing, I turned to many historic painter’s advice, ‘Don’t draw and paint so much what you see as what you feel as an emotion from your heart.’ I didn’t know how this would go with me. These painters I was getting this from were as old as a great grandfather or a great great grandfather! So much time has passed, and in my mind, my generation plus the newer are not exactly the same container. This was the place to start from, I felt, though. It was an adventure, I knew I might hit a wall and not be able to go further, but that was all right, I had my just by eye work already! But I really wanted to know where this sat with me. I wished it could flow more, but I didn’t know if it could. So I started out working and PRACTICING with “Gesture” and “Blind Contour Drawing.” You can find these term definitions in many books and on the internet. Gesture is trying to draw the whole thing faster in one unbroken gesture. Blind Contour is looking at the object you are drawing and draw it while not looking at your paper (you sometimes are allowed one or two peeks to align major parts. There is also just Contour Drawing I think. To get things looser you can…


  • just draw the negative spaces around the subject and let the subject take care of itself

  • draw with a pencil tied to a stick

  • do not draw any lines - just dots-dash marks

  • blacken the whole paper (rubbed graphite or graphite powder or charcoal) and draw with the eraser

  • doodle

  • tape two pencils together and draw with them like it was one pencil

  • blindfold yourself - feel the subject and draw it while you feel along it without looking at the paper…do a self portrait in this way

  • try a blind contour with the opposite hand from your writing hand

  • draw with your foot

  • draw with a single line a panoramic view around the room (you can look and look away with this one - tapped big newsprint paper or what ever)

  • exercise your body before you draw or while too


But practice is mostly what will get you looser.

I can’t lie, I got this last part from the book (I guess it’s alright to put in here) “Drawing Projects an exploration of the language of drawing.” Authors: mick maslen and jack southern, © 2011 This may be too advanced to start out with and abstract, but it goes into detail about the ways to do these ideas. I didn’t have it until a year ago or so. All my practice through the years has been with gesture and blind contour, not the maslen book. I also delved into Lynda Barry and Danny Gregory and other books that were more how to (Danny was kind of how to). I would go to our library or any towns library [make a day of it, each store or library may have different stock - learn as much as you can], book store, art store or on line, and look for something I liked. I’d either try and order it through our library’s interlibrary loan system and take notes, or get it from the library, or, in rare cases buy it. I bought the Drawing Projects book and others. But I don’t have money to throw around so what I bought was on sale or very important. I’m sure there are others out there I might have learned more from, but I haven’t found them yet. (Art stores and catalogs are a great place to learn about art materials first hand. You can ask all the questions you want and in some cases test there or get samples or buy one individual representative from open stock! The bigger probably the better. Do you know someone who would let you try a bit of theirs? And of course as most know, the internet and internet videos!!! Sign up for a class physical or digital!) We all can learn from each other! I myself don’t like the idea of one top artist. I think that place should be reserved for God or Nature! Everyone is top artist!

So if you set out on this practice course everything you produce is an option - what you started with and more relaxed drawings along the way. And practice doesn’t have to be anything you keep. But practice and working at drawings with what new things and feelings I had along the way, got me looser in time. I did so much in time the impulse wanted me up on the surfboard more. But I didn’t forget how to draw tight. My subject matter determines how and what surface I am going to do the drawing. So there were tighter drawings along the way, but sometimes I would pick certain subject matter that I wanted looser. And try it looser. And nine times out of ten it was never loose enough. I tried and tried to draw a subject like a portrait with all the background design in it (if that was the solid design of the subject). Or try and draw two subjects together and I never could. If I had not cut out part of the background or cut out one subject from a two subject drawing the drawing would be way too much busy. I tried and tried to do this over the years and never had any luck until recently. (I really got looser!) Practice is the key. I got a self portrait of me with all the background in it! It is more a cartoon, but it is a good cartoon, I think. It sits as is.

When you practice don’t worry about the outcome drawing. And practice is what you need to be doing. Practice one drawing over the other - one blind contour over the other. Better to worry about the cost of the materials you are using. These can be cheapest you can get. If you have money you can do all this on more costly stuff incase you get a rare outcome you want to keep. But you should not worry anything about the outcome of practicing. This is ALL about the doing. Use newsprint or a smaller pad of something, pencil, pen etc. Your body has to get used to the doing of making marks, and curves, angles while drawing without looking. Eye hand coordination. And not looking or not looking very little while producing the lines. You will start slow, but after practice you might want to go faster with some passages. Making lines and not looking. You will feel this shoring up in you as you go, I did. Your mind will get accustomed to follow the lines and the hand will follow along easier. Relax don’t worry. When you start out this won’t follow thru so much. Practice. Blow yourself out. Then drop it, forget it, get lost in anything else and eat and go to bed. Let your body take care of the rest. It’s like learning to type, ski, skateboard, play piano, you just need to practice, your body takes care of all of it. I can’t tell you if you should use Gesture or Blind Contour or both, I guess what feels right to you. I used to go out in the car and find a place to park and practice on blind contour. Parking lots, malls, coffee shop, library, commute, freezing the TV screen or video, lunch break, if legal, cell phone photo or laptop, old photos, magazines. The legal advice I got for photographing is if you are on public property you can take photos. If you are on private property you have to ask. If you are on public property you can photo private property, but I wouldn’t telephoto inside too much through windows of people’s homes. Also photos outside through restaurant’s windows of people eating. People eating anywhere is not too cool to photo, use discretion.

As you practice over the months or year(s) you will get more fluid…you can take an occasional looks at the paper, if this is not practice. But if the drawing tightens up too much, you will have to decrease that. This is all about you and what you want your outcome to be. (Like I said, some people will not need to do this ever from the get go. Practice could hurt them.) I suggest not forgetting how to do tighter drawing because some aspects or subject matter may require some reversing back into it for drawings to come.

You have to relax and not care as you progress. If you then want to make drawings with this new skill, you will probably have to take risks. Drawing through feeling is faster and your not looking as much. You should flow more. The drawing must express through your execution as much as the likeness. You will make mistakes. You can erase a mid to light line. If you make a big mistake of a heavy dark passage it’s harder to impossible to get it all erased. (I suggested before to use kneadable eraser to get up as much graphite as you can before you try to erase.) You might ruin a perfect drawing by one mistake in a flawless execution! You have to be ready for this, you don’t have to like it. You have to put drawings on the line. I hate it but sometimes you have to. (I also suggested paper tone patches you can drop on the drawing to see if what you are thinking of doing is right…but that breaks the flow too.) Digital scanning and editing can get it clean again. But you have to take risks to get more flow. Usually the more drawings you have done and saved, the easier it is to take risks Ha!  Try not to think about the risks and just go. I wouldn’t drop practicing though unless you feel that it is getting you nowhere or too loose. If you can go back and tighten, further practice should not hurt anything. After a long while of doing this (months/years) you just want to again only do drawings, not practice, or I do. I still need to practice. Sometimes when you are really tired from work or whatever, you can still practice if you feel unsecure to pull off a drawing. I mostly work in the mid size range. I never do many tiny line drawings as yet.

Throughout I have taught and critiqued myself. I really would have benefited from other opinions. Especially concerning overall knowledge of materials or computers. I’ve had help on boards but never someone who could really see where I wanted to go and cut to the chase. Would have saved me countless hours of work. You can either critique yourself or have another, you trust, do it. I have had an illness too to deal with over the years that stopped my from progressing in art and drawing after I was in college. That is why I am now slowly getting on to this now.

For months and/or years you can march in step like this. Doing & practicing. Hopefully at sometime your drawing will be easier and you will know where you are going better. You may end up following a common way of working or mix a new media together or you may drop drawing for another media, decide to go into another field like medical research or want to do art only part time. But many, and now is just the time, will have to whittle down and fine tune just how they will work at the end of all their practice. I talk about this because this is more only to do with you yourself and can’t really be taught by anyone. Your advisor may know or you can draw on all your knowledge and devise better ways of doing things that flatter only you. Maybe you will want to switch to mix media, watercolor, be only a cartoonist, make your cartoons into fine art, turn to working only digitally. In my mind part time art can be as serious as full time. Do you want to work inside, outside, on the go? My back is weak so I never went in for a drafting table. I just can’t sit up to do drawing. So I use a chair or a couch. I like to travel, though I have not done much. I have a habit of getting into any kind of situation and combining things, so all my materials and totes are waterproof and dust proof, shock proof and hopefully can be packed up tight. Where I can, I list out and organize. A sampler of surfaces can quickly help you choose what to put a particular drawing on rather than unpacking all your pads etc. Where you store drawings is important…temp and RH and display and the paper archival standard. There are no bounds to innovation!

If you feel in the end that something is still not 100% start looking for something to rectify the situation. No one can tell you what to do, even the art masters of history, if they were alive. It’s all about you and what turns you on in the end. It’s all good. Don’t worry so much. You have knowledge behind you to choose from. Your work will be wonderful. It will be fun! Yours is unique in all the world. I believe every generation is a new container for life, thus art! Have fun, love art! In the end it will start loving you back and not causing so many problems. Ha! 

And I am talking like I am really through with all this. I am not. I’m still doing and practicing. Thinking up new things that might help and giving them a try. I got my first portrait with all the back in, a major milestone. You probably will find out new things to try all your life. Drawing is wonderful! You will have a friend for life.

First Eagle I’ve seen!  High in snow dappled sky early one frosty morning!  Relaxed, moving probably to a warmer roost.  I studied it.  They fly fluffier than a hawk with bits of white.  No other bird has so much white on the front and back end!  I had to turn and drove under him again.  I wonder what my dad would have said.  I heard they were around, but hadn’t seen one.

MERRY CHRISTMAS EVERYONE!



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