Re: April Commissions
Apr. 19th, 2022 06:03 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rynlingI'm starting to understand where I need to be in order to draw illustrations myself instead of commissioning other artists, but I'm not sure how to get there.
I think it's a matter of drawing compulsively in the same way that I write compulsively.
Over the summer I took a virtual class with Choodraws, and it was an interesting experience. She recommended a lot of books and graphic novels that have influenced her, and I read and commented on every single one of them. Also, I found that I could write paragraph after paragraph about what I like about art and what I find visually appealing about certain pieces of art and how form expresses theme, etc etc etc...
...but then, when it came time to actually practice drawing things, I was like, "Okay I'll do that later if I have time maybe." And it's not about laziness, because I "do art" almost every day (the exceptions being when I have a full day of class prep and teaching), but I'm just not mentally able to put in the insane amount of time that would be necessary for me to git gud.
Basically, if you want to develop your skill as a visual artist, what you have to do is look at a thing and draw it over and over and over again with varying levels of detail, and then you have to do this for a lot of things all the time every day. There's really no way around that. And when I was taking this class, I was watching Choodraws do study after study of the curly plastic cord on an old-fashioned telephone, and her intense level of concentration on this one stupidly difficult yet ultimately meaningless object made me physically, viscerally ill. It was like watching a torture scene in a horror movie, no joke.
I think the unfortunate reality is that, while I love art and comics more than anything in the world, I'm a writer.
I think it's a matter of drawing compulsively in the same way that I write compulsively.
Over the summer I took a virtual class with Choodraws, and it was an interesting experience. She recommended a lot of books and graphic novels that have influenced her, and I read and commented on every single one of them. Also, I found that I could write paragraph after paragraph about what I like about art and what I find visually appealing about certain pieces of art and how form expresses theme, etc etc etc...
...but then, when it came time to actually practice drawing things, I was like, "Okay I'll do that later if I have time maybe." And it's not about laziness, because I "do art" almost every day (the exceptions being when I have a full day of class prep and teaching), but I'm just not mentally able to put in the insane amount of time that would be necessary for me to git gud.
Basically, if you want to develop your skill as a visual artist, what you have to do is look at a thing and draw it over and over and over again with varying levels of detail, and then you have to do this for a lot of things all the time every day. There's really no way around that. And when I was taking this class, I was watching Choodraws do study after study of the curly plastic cord on an old-fashioned telephone, and her intense level of concentration on this one stupidly difficult yet ultimately meaningless object made me physically, viscerally ill. It was like watching a torture scene in a horror movie, no joke.
I think the unfortunate reality is that, while I love art and comics more than anything in the world, I'm a writer.
