Thoughts on Drawing
As
a Visual and Media Studies major, and former IB Art student, I found it
embarrassing to say I couldn’t draw, which is why I signed up for the
introduction to drawing course at Duke. Whenever I needed to present sketches
of my art projects to my teacher in high school, he was always hesitant about
the piece, because the drawings never did justice to the end product created in
clay. When I worked in the fashion industry the last two summers, I could
always explain to the tailor what to make, and show him or her images, but
whenever I presented a sketch, it made no sense. That was when I realized for
me, drawing is an essential life skill, and something I had to force myself to
learn as much as it scared me. When I first came to the class at Duke, I didn’t
think it would challenge me as much as it did. I found doing homework for my
graduate art history seminar less intimidating than my drawing assignments for
this class. I found that even when I spent a considerable amount of time on
these assignments that I was never happy with the end result. However, I
realized that the more you practice and allow yourself to make mistakes with
drawings, there more you will learn. That is something essential this class has
taught me, and something I will continue to apply to when I draw. I definitely
found that although this class was challenging, it pushed me to learn in a
positive direction, and taught me a few essential skills I can attempt to apply
to the next time I am required to draw for something else.
One significant theme that repeated
when Professor Fick gave me feed back was to use my eyes and rely on my eyes
rather than what my brain imagined the image to be. I always thought that was
more and more difficult to do, until I compared it to a phonetic language,
where you read exactly what you see. As I continued to work in the class, I
tried more and more to draw exactly what I saw and shut my brain off, and the
less of a conscious effort I made to focus on the image, the more naturally I
was able to draw it. What I found most useful for me in this class was the
sketchbook, because in most of my sketchbook drawings I focused on a single
image, rather than an entire space or location. I found understanding spaces in
two dimensions difficult to interpret in comparison to understanding a single
object, which is why I found the second part of the course more challenging
than the first. I think specifically for me, this makes sense because I have
only previously worked in three dimensions with clay, or in film, which again
allows me to explore three-dimensional spaces before having to use a camera to
convert that into a flat image.
Throughout the course we were
encouraged to use both pencil and charcoal. Although as a beginner, pencil was
probably better for me to use with the increased flexibility to erase and
change things around, I enjoyed using charcoal a lot more. I found that the
drawings I did in my sketchbook with charcoal, or the object drawings I did
with charcoal gave me a lot more flexibility to add value to the drawing,
whereas shading with pencil was very difficult. Working with these two
materials made me wonder what it would be like to work in pastel and color
pencil as well as other two dimensional materials such as paints. I wonder how
different working with these other two dimensional materials is in comparison
to working in clay, which is what I’m most used to doing.
Ultimately, this drawing class has
been a great learning experience to understand the basics of drawing, and what
it takes to be able to draw well. I have learned important concepts such as
attempting to draw exactly as you see things, rather than creating things in my
brain when I’m trying to show something realistic. Another thing I realized and
think is true that is that when there is pressure to learn a skill like drawing
that takes a lot of practice in fourteen weeks, there is only so much one can
accomplish. I hope to continue practicing drawing with less time pressure after
college, and spend more time on putting into practice the concepts we learned
in this class.
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