The thing about doing an average of a drawing a day (actually 75 drawings in 93 days so far) is that after a while you start filtering everything you see through the lens of "is that something to draw?"
A cracked sidewalk (maybe). The floor (no). The hallway (yes).
You start running out of objects; all plants begin to look the same; bicycles are too murderously hard to draw. I would rather stick to objects, because I also want to do a landscape series, and I don't want to run out of landscapes that I've already drawn, and I've decided for mostly arbitrary reasons not to include people or parts of people in this set.
Seeing the world through a filter of art makes you see things. It makes you see how they relate to other things in the visual plane. Perspective becomes less about lines converging at the horizon and more about where things really seem to be (or on the visual plane, where they are) in relation to each other. You have to keep repeating the mantra: draw what you see, not what you know. That trunk is next to that branch, even though that branch is on a different tree 30 feet away. The pot handle is the same width as the pot. The edge of the roof is nearly vertical. So these things that you know aren't true make the object look accurate. If something is hard to draw, it's just that you aren't relating its parts properly to each other and their surroundings.
Rather a life lesson, that.
Alaska Stories
10 years ago
