Thursday, March 6, 2008

More thoughts on Drawing

I highly doubt the use of drawing anatomical parts out of memory as practice. And the reason behind my doubt is mainly because I've done so much of this kind of practice in the past. And I must say, the question of how fruitful it is aside, the practice itself is damn depressing. And it's hard to get good at something if you don't really like doing it. A person only has so much time in his life. To me copying old master drawings seem like a better use of time. Some people dislike the action of mere copying another drawing. I can sympathize with that. For me though, copying old masters' drawings that I like is a process that I can bare with, feels almost like a meditation sometimes. Again, better than all of that would still be to draw from your imagination what you want to draw, OR, draw from observation what you want to draw. To me these two seem equally meaningful, for they both come from the innate desire to portray something. The problem that comes up, then, is that you, wait I don't know about you, but for me, at least, I don't feel that desire most of the time. It only comes up rarely. What then, can one do, to improve himself as an artist, at down times like that? Up to this point I would say one thing would be to do copies of old masters' drawings. The other thing, that I often forget, is to actively seek inspiration. I'm bring this point up, because for the past 2 years, I've often found myself scribbling at my sketchbook, trying to come up with something "good". While occasionally something "good" did come up, now I look back at it, the time would have been better spent just solidifying my drawing skills by doing more concrete practices like drawing from observation, or actively seek inspiration, from movies/music/museums/videogames/traveling.

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