I was sketching and thinking, and a song came on on my Tidal mix. It said: “If you learn as you go, you’ve got to go just to learn.” I could not decide if this was banal or wonderful. I decided on wonderful after I noticed the song was by someone called Radical Face. It was a good reminder that you should not overthink everything and just do things thinking that you will figure it out eventually.
I was sketching a picture of Björk making a silly face this evening. I know I have a tendency to draw the ears too small in portraits. This I often correct almost automatically after I have drawn an approximation of the ear, checking the proportions, because I know at least some of my bad habits. Turns out, Björk has surprisingly small ears. Seems like a good fit for me. I might draw more portraits of her.
One of the most difficult parts of drawing, at least for me, is seeing how the source image works. Squinting is said to be a good way to simplify forms, but I still need a lot more practice looking and seeing. One way of doing this is sketching the outlines of the darks in the image. You can do this quickly and do quick and dirty studies.
Before I had this site, I posted pictures to my Instagram page Tommi Learns to Paint. Learning to paint is a wonderful idea, but when you begin to get a hang of it, you soon run into all kinds of problems. How do you actually want to paint what you want to paint? How do you develop a style?
I was thinking about this a lot when I was watching Scott Waddell’s video Get Better at Drawing Quick today. He has a very distinct, soft style of painting. He also drafts his model very carefully, but it’s basically line drawing. I tried it a little bit with the sketch you see above. My drawings are very scruffy compared to anything he does, but it was interesting to try. I will certainly do this again.
You can go to Scott Waddell’s YouTube channel and watch him paint. Or you can buy one of his courses, which I did. Then go to Zin Lim’s YouTube channel and watch him paint. What Zin Lim does is completely different. I would like to say that the technique is different, but it almost seems like a different art form. Both are wonderful, but it makes you think what “learning to paint” actually is. There are so many ways to do it.
A documentary was playing in the living room, and I overheard someone talk about how women are typically lit in 2D lighting and men more typically in 3D lighting. I understood that this was not some new or alien form of light that was being talked about, but the way the shapes or planes of the face appear in photographs. This is something I have complained about for some time, so it was nice to hear someone validate my complaints.
When I look for photographs to sketch, it is difficult to find pictures of women that do not have a completely blown-out face. What I mean is that most of the face is just a flat surface of light. There are no contours, no roundness to the face or head, and not much more than a flat surface and outlines. That is not interesting to draw. In contrast, scruffy men and very old people are the best. They have all kinds of interesting features, but the main thing is that they are not usually shot with blown-out 2D lighting.
The solution for this would be to paint live models, or, as Ben Lustenhouwer says in one of his videos, insist on lighting and taking the source picture yourself.
I was talking to someone today about the way I seem to sabotage myself when it comes to deadlines. I make a plan to make the deadline, then I break it. This gives me pleasure because my brain tells me I have subverted the system. Trouble is, it’s my own system, I will struggle to make the deadline and all of this is pointless anyway.
Drawing seems to make for a good analogy that can shed some light on this self-sabotage. I have studied the basics of drawing, and I sort of know how to do it at least in theory. Sometimes I remember to proceed like I was taught, but quite often I get impatient, skip ahead and then the drawing sucks. I want the image to be on the paper immediately, but with the actual method that produces results, the image will simply appear suddenly at some point of the process. It’s almost like magic. (I wrote about this in an earlier post.)
The former way of drawing is pleasurable because it implies I am a genius who can simply conjure up images. Obviously I am not, but I really like to think I am, because when I do, my brain rewards me with sweet feel-good chemicals. It’s pleasurable all right, but the simple fact is that the latter method is the one that produces results. I learned from thinking about this that I should not trust my brain, but trust the method and trust the process. After all, magic, if anything, is even better than pleasure.
There is little time to draw, but this type of sketching seems to work as a quick solution. It feels very formulaic and strange, but it works. If you trust the process, an image appears as if by magic. Would that it would work for other problems in the world as well.
“We need to decide that we will not go to war, whatever reason is conjured up by the politicians or the media, because war in our time is always indiscriminate, a war against innocents, a war against children.” ― Howard Zinn