Thoughts on drawing

--by Coco Sheng

My interest in drawing originates from my passion for portrait photography. Each time when I was thinking about the photography composition, I used to draw them done like a very simple sketch. Then I found out that a little bit of drawing skills could enormously help improve the accuracy of my composition , as well as further understand relationships between objects in one photo.

What I originally though was to learn to draw people directly, but was told that I needed to start from the beginning, such as drawing geometric objects and still life. After one month of quick learning, I gradually developed my drawing style, which is highly detailed and very clean. This style requires enormous amount of time, due to accurate composition sketch and repeated shading process. What I enjoyed most was the sense of achievement when I looked at the realistic drawing I spent a whole day (8-10 hours) on, even for the most simple cubicle. I was always impressed by how you could perfect a drawing endlessly just by spending more time on it.  Before I started to draw people, I was fascinated with drawing old-fashioned oil lamps from middle ages. The different textures of glass, fire, rusty lampstand always caught my attention and made me amazed by the ancient craft.

This semester of drawing shed new lights on my drawing abilities and styles. I learned to appreciate objects from examining the negative spaces, by using charcoal which I did not know before but turned out to be so useful and fantastic. I was inspired to pay more attention to the surrounding environments rather than objects themselves. And my drawing style's drawback started to show, that I could hardly organize various objects well in one drawing. In other words, I was better at drawing a single object, but not at overlapping objects with different ideal scales and functions. Trying to offset this weakness, I spent more than 12 hours for each of the two last drawing assignments: photography drawing and fiction drawing. In the photography drawing, the people I inserted were still too separated from each other, which I improved in the fiction drawing. I learned to match subjects' eyesights, create interesting composition, as well as emphasize the theme. Hopefully my fiction drawing could represent my progress for this semester.

Drawing is always a time when I focus all my inner thoughts on one thing. I guess all art developing processes, including playing music and shooting photos, share the same thing: enjoy a moment of silence, peace and simplicity in the deepest mind. No bothering from fast-paced life, future considerations, or surrounding people. It is a moment where I feel like the only person on the earth, with full control of myself and my thoughts.