Drawing from observation

[Thittato]

I had another journal here that was about creativity, but this one is specifically going to be about drawing from observation, as opposed to drawing from imagination, or improvisation, or by any other means. This is a skill that really triggers me, as I'm very fascinated by this ability, but also it brings up a lot of frustration. From 2012 to 2013 I spent one year in a traditional art school which had this skill as its foundation, and with the help of the book Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain by Betty Edwards, I was able to finally understand what this skill is about (the teachers weren't really so good at explaining it to me). She dissects the global skill of drawing into five basic component skills, and, which she claims, these are not drawing skills, but perceptual skills:

The global skill of drawing:

One: the perception of edges

Two: the perception of spaces

Three: the perception of relationships

Four: the perception of lights and shadows

Five: the perception of the whole, or gestalt

I continued to draw like this for another year after that year at art school was over, but then I stopped, and have only been drawing in a much more improvised way since. Naturalistic drawing has always had very much a feeling of hit-or-miss and dabbling, and my line was still pretty crude and unrefined. However, now that I have started up again, I have a desire to take it to the next level, where I can really see that my line starts to get more refined and artistic and that there is a sense of effortlessness in it. My first goal will be to just draw something from observation for 30 days now, just something every day, if only for 10 minutes, to get back to this habit. I have already started as part of that other journal I had here, and it feels like all my previous skills are gone and that I'm starting from scratch. However I have gotten a sense of warming up a little bit to it again today, so that is very motivating.

Perhaps the thing I enjoy the most about this is the feeling I get when it feels like the interaction between me and the thing I'm drawing just "clicks," like I lock in on the shape and I "see" it and there is a clear link between what is going on with my pen and what I see in front of me. Before this feeling it feels very frustrating and just like stumbling around in the dark, but when this feeling kicks in the whole thing is energized. Here are three drawings I did in 2014, and they are my reference point for what I need to get back to.

I will also go into how this relates to my meditation practice, and explore the correlation between drawing and meditation. I'm reading a pretty cool book now called "The Zen of Seeing - Seeing/Drawing as meditation" by Frederick Franck.

[Thittato]

Today it started out with some initial resistance, but when I actually sat down to do it, it was quite fun, and quickly I was getting the confidence that I would be able to connect with the portrait. I had forgotten all about Betty Edwards perceptual skills, but when I think in her terms, it is much easier to get into it. The focus today was on having a much softer touch with my pen. I also remembered a term one of my art teachers used a lot - simplification. You allow yourself to simplify the shape, since it is only a representation of reality, and not reality itself. I think this is important here in the beginning, to start out with a lot of simplification, and then I can rather add more details and precision later. The interesting thing with the brain, when looking at a naturalistic drawing, is that it does a lot of the interpretation itself. If you only give it some basic shapes that looks like something representing reality, then the brain will accept that as looking like reality, so better to give it something simple that works than something complicated that doesn't work.