J’observe
Since returning to drawing after a nearly four-year hiatus, my practices have oscillated between strict adherence to references and a complete disregard for them. When I first began drawing again, I felt horribly insecure—as in, how is it that I went from drafting fluently and on-the-fly to not being able to draw proportionate faces, figures, hands? I handicapped myself by relying almost exclusively on tracing, and it took months of working this way before I started to regain my former sense of competence.
Eventually, enough was enough. I went the opposite direction and forced myself to work without tracing, pulling only from my mind and immediate surroundings to create images. Everything else was taking too long, and I like to work quickly.
The sans-reference results are a little strange. The perspective on the faces still aren’t quite right. But I’m learning to embrace the weird stuff. And I’m recognizing that the more I work, the better the work gets.
An added benefit to going reference-less for a time was that it boosted my confidence. It taught me to care less about what the end result looked like and to just enjoy drawing along the way. My skills got significantly better significantly faster than they did during the period I relied on tracing, and so when I finally did return to drawing with photo references, I was surprisingly solid.
The pink and green pastel backgrounds of the header illustrations are reminiscent of the large sheets of colored charcoal paper I used to love using in high school, which is maybe the last time I sat to do a real blended portrait like these ones. I forgot how nice it feels to lose oneself in the observation of light and shadow. To sculpt facial features through shading, layer upon layer, until that almost magical moment when you trick your own eye into seeing something you’ve drawn as three-dimensional…
It’s intimidating and a little heartbreaking to return to something you once loved (and were maybe even great at) to realize that the time you spent away from it meant real skills lost. I am happy to say, however, that after a rededication to the medium, I now feel like my drawing is the strongest it’s ever been. My hope is that I’m only at the start of what I might someday be, but mostly I am grateful for where I am now: drawing almost daily and feeling very much like myself.