Drawing

 Over the last few weeks I've been trying to doodle more. Doodle, draw, just sit down with a pencil and a load of paper and draw.

Recently at work the prospect of re-running some drawing courses came up again. The last one I ran was just an hour over a lunch break and felt hurried / rushed, and I said I'd only teach if I got to teach a 2 hour session. Even in 2 hours the time will disappear so quickly, and exercises would need to be regimentally timed (which of course puts pressure on folk who want to learn, or just create without any kind of pressure). 

I love drawing faces, I also love copying panels from Manga (like the one above) as that lets me stretch my inky fingers into using pens more. So any sessions would probably be based on drawing faces, particularly drawing from imagination - where you really don't know what you're going to get when you start out by drawing the way I usually do. 

It starts with a rough shape, often scribbled. I love Andrew Loomis' "Fun with a Pencil" book, purely because it shows you the fundamentals of drawing from imagination and using construction shapes and lines to build something instantly recognisable as a face. 

Loomis' books are so beautifully constructed, and they're great for beginners too - even though it's blatantly obvious that most folk will never achieve the level of skill Loomis did during his illustration and advertising careers, the tips and tricks he shows do demonstrate what's missing when you consider the way that most folk learn to draw nowadays (from video tutorials on tiktok or youtube, or various online drawing courses that move from a few scribbles to a completely detailed drawing of an owl in less than 2 steps). 

As well as Loomis I really admire Betty Edwards' "Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain" because it takes you through an actual course, a method of not only covering the basics of drawing but actually improving, getting better, and measuring that success in a really tangible way. 

I have a busy mind, and busy hands. I cannot sit still and do nothing, not even when watching TV. I need to be doing something or creating something. If I go on holiday and I don't take a sketchbook and pencils with me (not necessarily to draw my surroundings or anything), I know that there will be times where I'm sitting bored in our holiday hotel or lodge or cottage, and the girls will be on their phones (Something I've never developed an obsession for) and the perfect antidote is to just pick up the sketchpad and start doodling. 

I don't claim to be any kind of a skilful artist, I don't claim to always know how to impart my 'how to' to others, but I do know that anything I draw is an immensely satisfying timesink to me at the time I'm doing it (sometimes I look at the results of a night's doodling the next morning and just want to chuck the lot in the bin, which I do frequently from time to time). Far more satisfying than typing in a random prompt into some AI image generator, and getting some horrid clinical pristine result back out, that took absolutely no effort or skill on my part whatsoever. So I will carry on, even when the world becomes more and more lazy and obsessed with image generation via AI.