DRAWING: Find Your Practice Room
If you picked up a flute tomorrow, you wouldn’t expect that you’d be able to play Bach’s Adagio in D minor at your first setting. You’d know you needed to practice.
But as an artist, if a finished painting is like a concert…where do you practice?
Ep.17 guest Esté MacLeod suggests the sketchbook.
MacLeod sees a sketchbook as a critical place for practice.
Sketchbooks are a pivotal part of her painting process.
It’s where, yes, she practices her drawing, but it’s also where she begins working on ideas. She leaves herself notes next to sketches. She draws thumbnails and problem solves.
Sketchbooks hold a huge part of her thinking and problem solving work. Things that would fall under practice. And it gives her a safe space to explore those ideas before she starts work on the painting.
Put it to Practice:
Musical practice looks like a lot of different things including warming up through scales. If you find yourself tripping over small things in your painting process, it may mean that you need a safe space for warm up and practice.
Use your sketchbook to work on ideas. Leave yourself notes. Practice drawing things. Do thumbnails and the visual thinking that is required in painting. Warm up your brain and your hands and your ideas so that when you move to your surface, you are warmed up and ready to create something exciting.
Not all thinking and discovery has to happen in your painting
It’s where she begins working on ideas. She leaves herself notes. She practices drawing things. She may even do thumbnails but mostly it’s about housing the THINKING she’s doing around her work. And it also means she’s not doing all that thinking and discovery and problem solving IN the painting. She’s not starting cold when she turns to her canvas.