Drawing
Drawing is fairly daunting. The level of talent within the art community ranges from people like me (novice), to the extreme maestros like Da Vinci or modern day artist Stan Prokopenko. The discrepancy between the artist bell curve is very dramatic. This makes people who lack raw talent feel like they can never learn the skill of drawing. In fact, drawing is a skill anyone can learn. To become better at art, one must learn to look through the lens of an artist.
I’m going to break down what I’ve learned from drawing, and give an explanation of why everyone can learn this skill.
As long as I can remember I’ve been drawing, creating, and loving art as a whole. I really began to develop a deep connection with the medium of drawing in high school. For me, drawing allows me to take my thoughts, and interpret them the best I can on paper. I love this idea Steven Pressfield has about the muse, (an aether-like space where all thoughts and ideas circulate within consciousness), and how thoughts appear like a manifestation of your desires. For me, I have these dramatic dreams every night, almost lucid in nature, where I tap into what I believe is the muse. From these dreams I start to visualize what I want my next drawings to be. I don’t know if this is true for everyone else, but I can build worlds and develop characters while visualizing. It then enables me to take my favorite ideas I’ve seen, and move them from thought to paper.
This brings me to my first lesson: Learn to embrace the suck. These thoughts, as intricate as they are in my head, always turn out different from how I imagined them. Instead of beating myself up over the imperfections, I embrace and learn from them. This enables me to detach myself from every piece that I create, and fuels me to do a better job on the next.
As you fuel your desire to get better at art, you subsequently learn how to fix the mistakes you were making on previous pieces. This typically comes in the form of lessons. Stan Prokoponeko (mentioned above) is an excellent teacher and artist. His Youtube channel is one of the most helpful channels I’ve seen when it comes to learning how to draw. The way he is able to break down fundamental ideas into visual lessons, makes learning much easier and fulfilling. Most art pieces start with a fundamental technique, usually dissolving elements down to their most basic components. If you can draw a square, circle, or triangle, you can learn to draw anything you’d like. For me, before I start a piece, I break each element of the piece into basic shapes. See example below.
Once the shapes are broken down, you can start to add volume (turning squares into cubes, circles into spheres, etc). This visual mapping system makes it very easy to maintain perspective, proportions, and gesture.
Which brings me to my next lesson: The simpler the better. When you overcomplicate, it makes life much harder to navigate. Art is a game of simplification and it’s translated into every aspect of life. A tree is one giant rectangle, sprung out on either side are a series of cylinders, followed by spheres that lie on top of said cylinders. You can do this for every object there is. The better you can become at visually mapping the subject you are trying to draw, the easier it is to make something look the way you intended.
The fun aspect of drawing is having enough fundamentals down to develop a creative voice. This is your so-called “Style.” This is where I differ from traditional art schools, because I genuinely believe that teaching yourself how to draw will allow you to explore different realms of your creative voice. Art school is fantastic, don’t get me wrong, many amazing artists come from art school and have incredible careers. Yet, I think that the people that revolutionize the world come from untraditional backgrounds. For example, one of my favorite artists, Zdzislaw Beksinski, was a self taught artist, whose art conveyed a deeply emotional aspect of human nature. He grew up in the post WW2 era, and his art is a reflection of his environment.
Which brings me to my final lesson: Each person has their own taste, which means you can have your own style. For me, the most important aspect of art, or any hobby, is that you enjoy what you do. I realized the deeper I explored fundamental topics, the less imaginative I was becoming. For example I have a really tough time drawing faces, yet, the more I practiced drawing typical faces, the more it felt like a chore to do so. So instead, I practice what I need to, and then incorporate it into something that I’d rather work on instead. I have this balance of learning the essentials, and then turning the essentials into a new technique I can implement into my pieces. This ultimately has kept art exciting and has allowed me to continue to develop a creative voice, one in which I am happy with. I noticed the more I created art to please other people, the less I pleased myself. I forgot the whole reason I fell in love with drawing in the first place was to push the limits of my creativity. People like authenticity, the closer you are to your authentic self, the more success you’ll see in your creative endeavors.
My long winded version of basically saying, “Anyone can draw” (Insert Ratatouille meme). I genuinely believe it’s a skill that anyone can learn, and by breaking elements down into their most basic forms, you can start to see through the eye of the artist. Do this for long enough to develop your voice, and you too can push the limits of your imagination.
Thanks for reading.
With love,
Kai
Weekly Poem:
Clouded judgment
Trial
Breakthrough Vision
Trial
Destruction and Blank Slate
Trial
Beauty in the eye of the beholder
Pure essence of the creative on display
Destruction
Layers of intertwined thought and emotion
Process and progression
Final but not complete
Rest and Exhaustion
Reset and repeat
The endless pursuit of one's creative expressions
