Drawing and Me

I have been involved in art for as long as I can remember. It’s just one of those things where you can’t pinpoint exactly when you started because it’s been a part of your life for so long. When I would be cleaning around the house and going through old things I would find notebooks and notebooks full of drawings from when I was so young that I don’t even remember doing them. Of course, looking back at the drawings now I see that I was absolutely terrible at that young age, but I absolutely loved it. I was really into Pokémon back then, so I had several notebooks dedicated to drawing Pokémon doing the most random things. Then I got into drawing cartoon characters like Dragonball Z or Disney characters or anything I cam across. I have no idea what kinds of things went through my mind as a child. When we come across those, my family and I would just sit down and laugh at my funny little drawings.

As I got older, I got more and more into actually drawing well. I started getting those “How to draw [insert anything here]” books. I looked at those for a bit and got some good tips, but decided that I didn’t like their methods and just did my own thing using things I learned here and there. I always liked drawing animals or fantasy-type things because to me they were the most fun. I had never done shading before this class, and I definitely had never drawn buildings before. All of the drawings I have done before were focused on line or sometimes looked cartoony, so this class was a great chance for me to actually learn and improve upon a technique that I had never used before. I hope to incorporate shading into my future drawings to make them look more realistic.

After a while, I wanted to try something new besides drawing. I believe it was in middle school or early high school when I decided to try my hand at oil painting. I absolutely loved it, so for a while I just painted and didn’t really draw that much. All throughout high school, I entered my artwork, both paintings and drawings, into the school-wide art show. I always won something. Then again, I had a really really small school (as in my graduating class had 30 people) and they divided the sections by grade and categories, so in reality at times I was the only person in a category. It was still nice to see that little blue ribbon on one of my artworks, though! Personally, I think I’m better at painting than I am at drawing. For some reason, I can just “see” better in paints. I can look outside my window at various colors and objects and see exactly what I have to do with the paints in order to replicate what I see or get the look that I want. With pencils, however, its harder for me translate an object I see into shading with a pencil. Because of this, I think taking this class was excellent practice, and I got a lot out of it. I had never used charcoals before so that was a good experience, but I usually like having a level of detail, which I couldn’t obtain with just charcoals.

Without a doubt, this class has helped me improve my drawing abilities. Now I will be able to think about things such as composition, values, and subtractive drawing, which have all been so helpful. Maybe now using these new techniques I will be able to draw the picture that I have wanted to draw for a very long time: This wonderful picture of Aragorn! :)

(source: aurelia-art.com)

~ Carmen