art for all

25. Stuck with a Bad Drawing

April 19, 2021 Daniel Gregory Season 2 Episode 25
art for all
25. Stuck with a Bad Drawing
Show Notes Transcript

A listener asks me for advice on how to deal with drawing disasters and find her own voice.



welcome to art for all the sketchbook Skool podcast. I'm your host, Danny Gregory. I'm the founder of sketchbook Skool. I'm a sketchbook artist and I'm the author of a dozen or so books on art and creativity. And I love getting mail from you and from other people who want to share ideas or enthusiasms or problems with me, Mary Beth sent me an email asking how she could go about. Finding her own voice. She also said she was reluctant to draw on her sketch because if I make a bad drawing, I'm stuck with it forever. Isn't it interesting that everybody has their own style of drawing and making visual things. It almost suggests that we actually see things. Differently. Perhaps each of us is looking through our own lens that has particular scratches and distortions that come from years of accumulated experience. We may all be striving to capture the same reality in front of us, and yet despite skill and practice, we end up with very different marks on the paper and the same sense of satisfaction that we've actually captured what was in front of us. Even if you change media and techniques or look at your work over your lifetime, it's still you. What I find is that my own lines are usually recognizable to me right off, but only my more mature lines are recognizable to others. My style. If you will took time to emerge. I have a friend with whom I go on drawing trips and we plunked down and draw the same thing simultaneously sitting side by side. And it's wild to see how different we see things. When we swap sketchbooks, how we chose to draw different details and how we end beat each other, this observation or that one. Style. Isn't just true of drawing, but if you let it of the way that you write the way that you letter, the way that you design everything you put into your sketchbook, the only real trick is to be yourself. And that means letting go of fear and judgment, not worrying. I'm stuck with it forever. The fact is a bad drawing. Is this a drawing that you don't feel captured the moment, the way that you'd intended it to it didn't reach the destination that you thought you saw on the horizon. Maybe you were distracted. Maybe you were hungry. Maybe you were nervous that someone was looking over your shoulder and that they would snicker. Maybe you just weren't yourself. I say better to keep all those drawings and keep them in your sketchbook where they can be lessons. Honestly, I learned far more from those mistakes than from anything else. And even more from my inevitable attempts to fix the mistakes I slather on watercolor, or I go over the line with a heavier pen and I get an even bigger mess, but I learned something. My sketchbooks are all numbered, carefully chosen, beautiful paper, often hand bound, and the idea of having a big to herd in the middle of a book used to be very depressing. Now I flipped back and I remember how I want to stray and I'm the wiser for it. If you commit to leaving everything in your sketchbook, you'll find that you do each drawing a little bit more carefully, knowing that you're going to be stuck with it. And if not, so what, it's just a sketchbook, a journal better. Let it all hang out and be yourself better than masquerading as some impeccable genius who always bats a thousand. That's not you isn't sharing me. So back to finding your voice, it's like any sport you've got to practice, you got to stretch, try drawing like someone else go so far as to copy other people's drawings line by line. You won't actually end up with a copy, but your drawing of their drawing then make yourself draw the same thing. Over and again, or draw something incredibly complicated, like your cars engine or every hair on your arm, really detailed, highly accurate drawings, and then do something wild draw with a big fat brush or a Sharpie marker on paper towel, whatever loosens you up the same is true of writing. Try writing inverse or with no adjectives or incredibly tersely. Whatever, look at how magazines are laid out and let that inspire your sketchbook. The new Yorker, very dense, and then it explodes and they were the big picture or the national Enquirer shouts in lots of display faces USA. Today is interesting infographics. Why not graph what you eat for lunch or how many miles you drive and where. It's all meant to be fun and to expand the pleasure and the appreciation that you have for life. Anyone who looks at what you're doing is going to just be impressed by the fact that you're doing it at all. And if they don't like it, well, it's your journal, not theirs. Anyway, your sketchbook is your baby. Love it. Feed it. Give it variety and no one else will tell you if it looks a little odd. Thanks for joining me today. I'll create something new for you again next week until then I'm Danny Gregory. And this is art for all.