Your Drawing Isn’t Perfect and It Doesn’t Need to Be
Drawing is tough. It can feel like reprimand at the end of a .5 mm lead. Sometimes I anticipate my disappointment even before I begin. It won’t look like the thing I’m drawing I think. I’m ready to toss it on the “Well I guess you’re not an artist” pile even before I begin.
But maybe we’re asking drawing to do the wrong thing.
Listening to artist Esté MacLeod (Ep 17) talk about drawing is wonderfully refreshing. It’s so clearly a part of her creative process. She doesn’t bring to her sketchbook the rigid exactness that so many of us just starting out learning to draw or paint bring to ours.
To MacLeod, drawing isn’t about rendering the perfect Michelangelo sketch. Far from it in fact.
Her goal is to discover. To try on ideas and see how they fit. Drawing is play in physical form. It’s skipping stones across a pond. It’s laughter in a playground.
A UNIQUE CHALLENGE
As visual artists, we have the unique challenge to translate ideas into physical form. All artists really. Musicians to notes. Actors to voice and movement. And for visual artists the challenge is to take what’s in the ethos and bring it down through our bodies and out onto paper or canvas through a few faulty translation services.
The thing we felt when the idea was still in our bodies may feel very different when we’ve rendered it with graphite. But Esté MacLeod would say that difference is good. It’s important. It’s what makes you unique as an artist. It’s the first indication of your style. So maybe stop trying to kill it.
BRIDGE TO IDEAS
Drawing is also a way to experience curiosity in a physical form. So much curiosity lives and stays in our heads. And our heads are a great place for curiosity. Our heads can do rapid fire questions and answers. It’s efficient.
But if we want to be visual artists, there’s another type of curiosity we have to learn (and it is learned) to do. It’s to be able to express curiosity through materials like paper and pen. Canvas and paint.
To MacLeod, drawing isn’t about rendering the perfect Michelangelo sketch. Far from it in fact.
Drawing helps facilitate that. It’s a place where we can start wondering, “What would that look like if I did darks over here and lights over there?” And then we can answer the question on paper. Drawing helps us do that in an incredibly low stakes way.
BEYOND RENDERING
It’s so easy to think that the point of drawing is first and only to create a good drawing. That’s what we’ve been taught our whole lives. We can probably think of that one kid in our high school who everyone said was a good artist because of how realistic she could draw something.
But listening to MacLeod I’m realizing how limited my view of drawing’s purpose is. From her standpoint, rendering something realistic is so far down on her list of objectives for drawing it might as well not even be there.
For MacLeod drawing helps her learn to see. It helps her learn to express ideas in a physical form and it helps her solve visual problems so she can be confident beginning her painting. It’s about using marks that are unique to her and her style.
Drawing is so much more than rendering something realistically. There is so much more it can offer to us. But only if we let it.
Discover how to bring drawing into your process. Listen to Esté MacLeod’s Episode 17 here.
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