Ji Young's Thoughts on Drawing

Ji Young’s Thoughts on Drawing

Drawing class at Duke has been one of my favorite classes. Drawing for me is my biggest pleasure in my life, like singing for singers. Even though I chose my career into architecture for now, I don’t know how my future will be shaped; I want to be an illustrator, designer, and a fine artist as well. Throughout my life I spent the most of my time into studying visual arts. However, ever since I came to Duke it has been so hard for me to focus on arts because the academics are so heavy and time consuming for me. This part is my biggest challenge at Duke, since I think I enjoy arts better. I don’t know if that is because I am better at arts than studying. I don’t really know. But the thing is that I will continue studying visual arts in my life. Arts cannot be separated wherever I belong.

 In this class the one biggest thing I learned was patience. It has been so long since I drew, so I don’t remember if I drew on the same size or the smaller size of paper, but I felt like the paper was too big for me to draw when I worked on drawings this semester. My drawing never ended and took so much time for me to finish. I think that is because I am a perfectionist and I don’t want to turn in works that I am not satisfied with. So I kept drawing and drawing, and I even worked more on the drawings, even though the works were late. I learned how to “complete” work in this class. Before, I have been giving up or losing interest if the work took so much time. I think this habit prevented me from improving, but now I feel like I have grown so much from learning how to complete works. In this class I also learned how to deal with different kinds of pencils, from 4H to 6B. I’ve never done landscape drawing with pencil, and most of my landscape works were done by watercolor. So this time, I wanted to challenge myself with different levels of pencils only using black and white. It was quite hard but I am sure my skill has been developed so much. I really like how the works came out and hopefully other people would like them as well. I wanted to share one of my enjoyable moments at Duke so I recommended this class to my Korean friends. I will not hesitate to help them if they ask me out for feedback or anything next semester and I hope they enjoy too!