Yesterday was my first art class: Observational Drawing. We started with a lecture where I got an overview of drawing principles, which was AWESOME. Here are my favorite things that I learned:
1. Drawing is imagination realized. (YES IT IS. That’s why I’ve always longed to do it! I have so much inside-stuff that wants to get out!! This is a self-evident statement but still makes the list because it felt so validating to my longings.)
2. Drawing is the origin of our world. It’s how all ideas become reality (blueprints for example!)
3. **It is a collection of time. An amalgamation of images translated over time. It’s not a single moment frozen in time (like photography) and it’s not a copy. It’s an essence of collected time and a *representation* of what we see. (The first part of that definition straight-up makes me swoon!)
4. It is organizing chaos. Figuring out what is and what isn’t.
5. It is discovery. By recording observations and putting them in sequence, you can learn something new!
6. Concept is what we think we know is there (our brain filling in the blanks and making assumptions) and perception is recording information directly from observation. So the goal is to help the eye and hand communicate directly without getting the brain involved and messing it up.
We did an opening exercise from the Bauhaus school of thought (new vocabulary word for me!) which helped loosen us up and get comfortable putting pencil to paper. It also demonstrated how we all individually interpret subjects differently.
Then we did blind gesture drawings, where we looked at the tableau and drew rough outlines of the shapes for five minutes without looking at our paper! Of course it was a mess, but it was another great way to get pencil on paper, make a mess, and then we learned how to use that mess to pull out helpful info and start editing our rough-draft! That’s what you see here. The beginnings of my edits. This took me an inordinate amount of time just to do one corner of the whole tableau but I’m really please with what I managed to get down and I got to practice my angle and proportion skills a LOT which was SO HELPFUL.
I love that our instructor had us start by making total ‘messes’ of the paper in purposeful ways because it made everything more approachable.
My favorite takeaways from yesterday's teachings are:
“There will always be problems in your drawing until you’re finished drawing. Prioritize the biggest problems first.” - This is very empowering! It helped me stop fighting trying to be perfect and to realize that the whole process of drawing is handling imperfection in itself. The whole point is to keep working at it until it’s finished.
Also, drawing is “discovery and interpretation” and I’m there to “follow the process and let it evolve from my original idea.” Drawing is the act of DOING (paired with the choices I make) and how I solve problems. When I’m drawing, I am not a photographer. It’s about “getting in and out of predicaments as I go and compromising my ideas to reality.” - That's all SO LIBERATING.
I don’t feel pressure to be perfect when I walk up to the blank page anymore. He’s completely turned it into a puzzle to solve or into a rough draft to write and work into a finished essay over time. I can solve puzzles! I can write essays! This teacher is really the BEST.