Greetings again!
This is more Getting to Know You, but it may be of interest to someone, and it helps me to better understand myself as well.
I've always felt a need to draw. Ever since I was a kid, I don't think there was ever a time when I didn't do it.
I got my first taste of portraiture when I did an amateurish first attempt in about 2004. I did a couple more (Literally. I did two drawings.) and some of my friends liked it because nobody else around here could really draw. I did maybe four portraits that year... all of them pretty mediocre, yet they made people happy. I can't say I had the best work ethic. I didn't practice much and basically took a sabbatical after that year.
In 2007, one of my friends asked me to draw her, and I did.
An odd thing happened. Apparently, in the couple years I'd been slacking, I'd somehow gotten pretty good. I have no idea how this happened. Naturally, this prompted me to take another year off drawing altogether... I didn't have much time anyway, what with school and all. Not that I ever really studied in school, it just ate up 8 hours of my day and left me too tired to draw in the afternoons.
Cut to the year 2009.
I started drawing again and it started coming to me fast.
I can't explain it, but for some reason, I began really, seriously picking up the skill. It's not that I spend days practicing; in fact, I don't really "practice". I do maybe one drawing a week at most. Maybe it's just because I put a lot of effort into it. I research a lot. Perhaps my brain just is good at applying learned knowledge.
At any rate, one of the things I'll be posting a lot of here is art.
You can watch as I work, improve, and try new things... hopefully I'll learn something in the process and others will as well.
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That's happened to me several times. If I go several years without drawing, when I get back to it, I'm better at it. I finally understood why it happens when I remembered what I was doing during some of the years I didn't draw.
ReplyDeleteI'd see things ranging from someone's interesting face to a cloud and think about painting it. I'd be doing something else and think about the processes of drawing. Ruminating on it and thinking about art is such good practice that you can actually improve in the absence of any actual sketching. Also your unconscious mind will still analyze any good art you come across and that goes into the vast pool of experiences to draw from.
It's the same thing with all the arts. Learning is lifelong, if we lived three times as long we'd still be learning something about art every day of it.
I never thought about it that way. Perhaps even in the subconscious we have the power to teach ourselves new things... it's like the mind takes information on things we're not actively doing and uses the new information to improve itself when we do something related so that a more noticeable effect than expected is produced.
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