Embarassed, but Free

As I flipped through one of the new magazines on the shelf this morning, I was struck by some of the art inside. What I saw was art without rules or limits - art without a concept of preciousness or perfection. The artists used what they had to create what they wanted.

It's completely the opposite of the way I normally work - I didn't do any measuring or think about the real relationships between elements. I placed wild watercolor crayon marks and quickly constructed a face around them. It's weird. It's lopsided. The eyes are too close together and misshapen. It's perfect.

The product may not be something I feel confident showing off, but I feel like I tapped into something important while I was creating it. I felt unbalanced and challenged without feeling hopeless and lost. I felt happy just to be there: doing the work.

Comments

Ice Skating Characters

A Competent Profile

As I start to become more familiar with proportions and measurements for the various faces I attempt to draw, I am starting to wonder how to make a more complete portrait with my limited time. Do I stick to lines? Do I bring a brush and some ink? Which lines should I include? Which shapes are important to represent? Maybe this is a good time to look at the work other artists have done and try to work out some of their methods.

Inktober Day 3 - "Bait"

Old school pen and ink. I haven't used a crow quill pen since high school - and, even then, I remember struggling to get it to work. This time, I thought I would try to create something using only cross-hatching. The prompt word today is "bait". This word took me into a lot of different ideas, but the one I ultimately landed on is based on the will-o-wisp. In my head, I imagined glowing orbs in front of a copse of swamp trees all created with layers of cross-hatching. Things had to be scaled back a bit. There are still two trees in the background if you look hard enough. Success? Sort of. It forced me to use a different kind of pen and, in doing so, made me want to keep going and get better with it.

Rainbow Bisque

Search This Blog