Confessions of an Artistic Mind

I will be doing a sketch for today, so don't worry about that. I wanted to reply to a comment made by Gra in reference to my artwork. I was going to comment back, but I think it deserves it's own post. Gra is this really cool guy I met through having this blog. He's an artist as well. He works in traditional media. I love his use of colour and the vehicles he draws are a lot of fun. You can check out his blog here: http://elkart51.blogspot.com/

 ElkArt51 said...

Love the simple lines dani. I can't get my complicated head to draw uncomplicated pictures lol. xx gra

In all honesty, Gra, I have spent so many years trying to make my artwork more complicated. I was always looking for ways to do more detail. Asking, "What little things can I add to this to make it better?".

It was my computing power that lead me to start doing less complicated drawings. I think it was a much needed change for me. Partly because I need to work on form before I put in all the details and partly because I lacked focus. I've not done artwork like this for so many... actually I've never done artwork like this.

In art school I usually had a live model to work from. Before I go any further I would like to say that live models are really the best way to learn how to draw. My problem was: I couldn't think past that live model. What made it worse was I hated drawing anything from life except the figure. Flowers were about the only exception to this rule. Pictures were okay, but I had trouble looking at a picture and making it my own... even if the photo was something I had taken myself (which was usually the case)!

I was supposed to do sketches every day for some of my classes. I was terrible at that. I'd do really good some days, and other days I'd do all the sketches for the week in one day. Usually those sketches weren't very detailed, and none of them reflected me. When I finished with the classes that required me to do sketches every day, guess what? I stopped doing daily sketches altogether. Sketches were weekly at best, and usually only done because I couldn't figure something out on my substrate.

From the lack of drawing to the overly complicated drawings I really hurt my chances to become a really great artist then. Now I'm hoping this new procedure of drawing every day will help me out. I believe creating simple drawings to start will help me when I move on to more complicated drawings. It's a struggle sometimes to do these simple drawings, and sometimes they take more time that a more detailed drawing would take me to do. I hope to keep working and improving my methods. If only I could do the same with my writing. Oh well... you can't have everything.