Feeling things. Things like my face
Today I did something pretty different: I did a few drawings that weren’t supposed to look like anything. A few weeks ago the Guardian published a guide to drawing, and I got my hands on a copy. The first few exercises in the guide are about feeling what you’re drawing. Drawing as a way of recording the act of looking, is I think how they put it.
So there was a picture I drew by closing my eyes and feeling my face with my hand…
…and a shoe drawn with my wrong hand and without looking.
It was interesting to draw stuff where the point wasn’t for it to look like the thing itself. I found it tough to let go of that, a bit – when I first looked at the results I didn’t know what to think. Was it all right? For some reason, especially the face one, I almost expected mystical inner truth to be revealed. Instead there are some squiggles.
One thing that was nice, and this is probably more the point, was enjoying the feeling of seeing, and translating that through movement. My grip was more relaxed, I stopped feeling the time go by, and everything was smoother.
I’ll go back and do more of these, not only because they’re a good exercise but because they’re enjoyable. I’m glad I’ve come to it after doing some drawings with realism as the goal, though. It’s nice to get a bit of the gratification of doing drawings that look like stuff in the beginning. Now I can appreciate a bit of relaxing and feeling the process of seeing something, whereas if I’d started with this I’d probably be all ‘GRR SHOES MUST LOOK LIKE SHOES’.
