badly drawn girl

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Drawing is really hard. At art school you have compulsory drawing classes for three years. They used to terrify me. In first year the tutor was a really mean woman from the USA and she would say to all her favourite students, 'oh that's so in-too-it-tev!'.

But when she looked at my drawings she would just walk away without saying anything. Most of the class would get A's and B's, but I always got C-'s. In second year, the tutor was really nice guy. He would give us all sweets every hour, but that didn't really make my drawings any better. Most of the class got A's and B's, and I got C-'s. In third year, I stopped caring. I never bought expensive archival paper, I just did these big, scrawly, linear drawings on newsprint with crayola crayons and biros and stuff. They weren't even good, perspective, proportion-wise etc, they actually sucked quite badly. Sometimes I would draw cowboy hats on the models. When we had projects to hand in, I didn't even hand in drawings, I just did other stuff like videos and installations and called it drawing.
By this stage the rest of the class had really honed their skills and they could really draw, like really well.

At the end of the year, most people got A's and B's. I got an A, too.

― rainy, Friday, 14 December 2001 01:00 (twenty-four years ago)

damn did I accidentally discover the secret of drawing?
― rainy, Friday, 14 December 2001 01:00 (twenty-four years ago)

I think that by making videos and instalations and photogra[phy you got a sense of aesthics and a personal vision that transferd to drawing . that and not caring means risk taking and that means you are looser , makes it easier.

― anthony, Friday, 14 December 2001 01:00 (twenty-four years ago)

How do I kill these italics? I closed the header. Anyway, drawing can be taught. I was an art retard in grammar school, but I learned to draw in the past few years and am actually getting good at it. You do get better with practice, without even realizing that it's happening. But it's very frustrating for the first couple of years. Very much like learning an instrument.

― Kerry, Friday, 14 December 2001 01:00 (twenty-four years ago)

I got a D for my art GCSE.

― james, Friday, 14 December 2001 01:00 (twenty-four years ago)

my fwend rae - who is a theatre designer and a BRILLIANT cartoonist - once sed to me, if you can write, then you can draw.

just three days ago my fwend mike, who is a magazine designer, sed in my little pix that i draw on the transparency logs (to ensure we know which cpation goes with which image) i "have achieved abstraction".

― mark s, Friday, 14 December 2001 01:00 (twenty-four years ago)

i remind myself of cy twombly who i find deeply powerfull and to alot of people is scrawling

― anthony, Friday, 14 December 2001 01:00 (twenty-four years ago)

Fuck art, let's, um...

― Ally C, Friday, 14 December 2001 01:00 (twenty-four years ago)

...post to ILE, of course

― turner, Friday, 14 December 2001 01:00 (twenty-four years ago)

Idea that if you can write you can draw - also advanced in 'Asterix and Cleopatra'!

― Andrew L, Saturday, 15 December 2001 01:00 (twenty-four years ago)

I think Anthony's kinda right about why your drawing grades improved, Rainy. Urgent and Key: does the alleged drawing-writing relationship work both ways?

― Mitch Lastnamewithheld, Saturday, 15 December 2001 01:00 (twenty-four years ago)

rae's point was that if you can control a pen to form letters, you can (learn to) control a pen to form the Figurative, which seems good sense to me. The eye-hand stuff which produces verisimilitude is no more hard- wired than the alphabet: there's actually lotsa little books called LEARN TO DRAW NICE HORSEYS (or whatever) which you can raid for "keeping-it-real" tips. Or just copy other ppl's cartoons.

ps Rae has bee-yootiful writing which is ABSOLUTELY UNREADABLE!!

― mark s, Saturday, 15 December 2001 01:00 (twenty-four years ago)

I can't draw and have long since given up trying. I have no doubt that my terrible handwriting is another symptom of whatver it is in my BRANE that makes me RUBBISH AT DRAWING.

― DG, Saturday, 15 December 2001 01:00 (twenty-four years ago)

From the other POV, I have always been able to draw, without being taught anything, and I have often wondered why/how that is. It was obvious that I had a different level of ability but fuck me if I knew why. It sure wasn't because of academic diligence! But there is a really interesting book out there that possibly comes close to explaining it, called drawing on the right side of the brain. I wouldn't believe that 'if you can write, you can draw' line though, because my handwriting is pure garbage, all irregular and all over the place. Manual skill might be really helpful if I were a quick cartoonist or something, but a great sketch seems to have far more to do with interpretation than precision.

― Kim, Saturday, 15 December 2001 01:00 (twenty-four years ago)

They also say that a great way to trick your brain into thinking/seeing in the right way is to try to draw something from a picture or a photo, but only look at it upside down - because it forces you to look at the actual shadows, forms and shapes and not just what you *think* you see. Point in case, have you ever seen someone who can't draw, trying to draw a face? The nose was probably drawn with two big hard lines down both sides of the bridge and was doubtless a total disaster down by the nostrils - thing is, none of those lines were really there - and they weren't really looking for what was either. More likely they were asking themselves how to draw *a* nose, not *the* nose. If you see at all what I mean here.

― Kim, Saturday, 15 December 2001 01:00 (twenty-four years ago)

Yeah, I think Kim's OTM, there's definitely some validity to the right-brane drawing techinques, (another method might be to draw only the silhouette of what you see)- the trick is to draw the focus away from left-brain conceptualizations of what yr seeing, and actually capture what you see. Fuck, it's late, I've got some al-kee-hol sloshing around in my stomach, I think I'm making sense. Also, I could always draw, really, but practice (ie. drawing from life in university classes) has improved things further. Also, my handwriting is rubbish. Well, it might not be if I had to scribble extra fast during lectures 'cos every moment when the lecturer isn't speaking, I'm filling up the page with cartoons.

― Mitch Lastnamewithheld, Saturday, 15 December 2001 01:00 (twenty-four years ago)

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