This one is in response to the Kim Jung Gi and David Finch videos, about the importance of learning to draw the geometric solids. I got an early start at this.
I was about 10 or 11. My friend and I both drew, and we would get together every week at my house and lay out what we had drawn since last time to compare notes. There was mutual admiration, but also competition, a combination I would later come to think of as competition/camaraderie. And it was an amazing way for each of us to power our artistic development. It felt pretty good when the other guy obviously liked your work, and when his was better it made you really determined to be the winner next week, so you'd really knuckle down and draw more carefully.
My mom was usually sitting in the living room for these little bullpen sessions and could clearly hear everything we said. One time after he went home she stopped me on the way up to my room and said "Hey, do you want a secret weapon?"
I had no idea (learned it that afternoon) that at one time she wanted to be an artist, but she did. It must've been when I was really young because The Famous Artist's Course was published in 1960, two years before I was.
It was the one with ads in magazines with a little drawing of a pirate or a turtle, and you were invited to copy it as well as you could. You then send it in and a few weeks later they send it back with a tracing-paper redline critique showing what you did right and wrong and a recommendation that you take the course.
It was a subscription course, you give them your credit card number and they send you a big binder already stocked with the first few lessons, then each month you get a new lesson to add to it. She had the first 5 or 6 lessons, and I guess at that point she cancelled her subscription.
Well, long story short, I studied 2 of the lessons—how to draw simple objects (called the geometric solids) in perspective and how to turn the human figure into a sort of mannikin built from those objects. They also showed how to modify and combine them to make anything at all—bowls of fruit, flowers, houses, airplanes, camels—whatever you want.
The lessons on perspective and form also showed how to throw light on things. Well crap—how to draw form in perspective, how to build anything you want from those forms, and how to light and shade things. That's just about all you need! Spend grade school and high school drawing stuff for fun and using these principles all the time, then they're totally ingrained into your central nervous system (written on the spinal cord as I've heard it put). It becomes as natural as walking or talking—you don't even need to think about it anymore.
I'm pretty sure I wrote about this before on this blog, just as I also posted my work from the 90's. But that isn't important. I'm thinking into it again, more deeply this time, or with a different focus. I think I'm preparing to move my main activity back to drawing and painting and to this blog. Time will tell.
Postscript:
Looking for pictures for this post I discovered the entire contents of the Famous Artists Course on Google Docs. I've downloaded a few sections, and I'll be studying the composition course. If anyone wants to see the lessons mentioned above, #2 is Form, #3 is Composition, and #4 is The Human Figure.
Post postscript:
Soon after this I started winning all the time. He really liked the way I was drawing figures, with little spikes at elbows and knees. He thought it looked like a badass warrior robot. I let him take the binder home and study it, but in a few days he brought it back and seemed contemptuous or something about it—he hadn't studied anything and refused to. He decided to stop coming over and compare art after that. From that point on my art kept improving and his never did.
No comments:
Post a Comment