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Nov. 8th, 2002 04:00 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
aithneI'm really an awful visual artist.
I have a decent design sense, although it tends towards muted greys and sepias.
However, when it comes to actually drawing something that at least sort of resembles what I'm attempting to draw, I am *awful*. I have actually had art training, classes and classes and classes over the years, sketching and watercolors and life drawing.
The problem, you see, is manyfold:
1. I have no idea how to really see. In my brain, an object is an object no matter what light it's in, what angle it's at, etc etc. The hardest part of art classes was shading, for me. I literally do not see the changes in color that signal distance and the quality of the surface. I try and draw an object from all angles at once, because I draw my idea of an object and not the actual object.
2. I see outlines. Seriously. There is, for me, an outline around everything, marking it off from the surrounding visual field. It's sort of a corollary to #1.
3. I see pictures in my head, but these pictures are real, they live and breathe and they are exactly as real as the outside world is for me. What I do *not* see is what the actual drawing should look like. I don't have a process in my head that converts the picture in my head to pencil lines and swoopy things.
4. I cannot draw either straight lines or consistent curves.
5. my handwriting is for shit. seriously. This is a massive disappointment to me, because I always admired my mom's graceful and (usually) legible penmanship. I write with my right hand with slightly less facility than my left hand--but though writing with my right hand is slower and looks like a third-grader's handwriting, it's actually much more legible than my usual illegible scrawl. The slant of my printing varies according to the day and the mood I'm in, I leave out letters when they seem unimportant, v's and e's flatten into horizontal lines, as do m's and n's.
6. I have very, very poor depth perception for faraway objects.
I honestly don't think I have the right kind of neuron hookups to sketch well. I actually became a writer because I realized that while I was a shitty artist, I could write what I was seeing and *make* other people see what I saw.
I have a decent design sense, although it tends towards muted greys and sepias.
However, when it comes to actually drawing something that at least sort of resembles what I'm attempting to draw, I am *awful*. I have actually had art training, classes and classes and classes over the years, sketching and watercolors and life drawing.
The problem, you see, is manyfold:
1. I have no idea how to really see. In my brain, an object is an object no matter what light it's in, what angle it's at, etc etc. The hardest part of art classes was shading, for me. I literally do not see the changes in color that signal distance and the quality of the surface. I try and draw an object from all angles at once, because I draw my idea of an object and not the actual object.
2. I see outlines. Seriously. There is, for me, an outline around everything, marking it off from the surrounding visual field. It's sort of a corollary to #1.
3. I see pictures in my head, but these pictures are real, they live and breathe and they are exactly as real as the outside world is for me. What I do *not* see is what the actual drawing should look like. I don't have a process in my head that converts the picture in my head to pencil lines and swoopy things.
4. I cannot draw either straight lines or consistent curves.
5. my handwriting is for shit. seriously. This is a massive disappointment to me, because I always admired my mom's graceful and (usually) legible penmanship. I write with my right hand with slightly less facility than my left hand--but though writing with my right hand is slower and looks like a third-grader's handwriting, it's actually much more legible than my usual illegible scrawl. The slant of my printing varies according to the day and the mood I'm in, I leave out letters when they seem unimportant, v's and e's flatten into horizontal lines, as do m's and n's.
6. I have very, very poor depth perception for faraway objects.
I honestly don't think I have the right kind of neuron hookups to sketch well. I actually became a writer because I realized that while I was a shitty artist, I could write what I was seeing and *make* other people see what I saw.
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no subject
Date: 2002-11-08 04:29 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2002-11-09 12:07 am (UTC)(Seven years old being the point at which I realized, "Oh my god, this is CRAP" and abandoned it straight away. Can't point fingers at anyone but myself on that one.)
The thing is, for me, I don't actually enjoy the process of drawing, at all. Being left-handed makes a number of things having to do with pens awkward, and that's one of them. If I'm going to go to the trouble of drawing, i want the results to look good. Not to anyone else but me, true, but if it looks ugly to me I'm going to ball it up and throw it away as soon as possible.
I want the pictures in my head to come out, but I want it to be a *photograph* of what i'm seeing. None of this fancy artistic interpretation business, none of this choosing exactly the right line to evoke *that* curve of cloud against that portion of sky. I want to make people *see* the way the heron's neck curves against the background of water like a silent string quartet without having to spend days trying to get the line exactly right. (I never did get it right.)
I want to shove a camera inside my head and take pictures of what goes on there. Writing's much closer to that than drawing will *ever* be.
And I have no idea what this non-judgementalness is of which you speak, alas. I am constitutionally incapable of not being self-critical. Fortunately, I am natively good at a number of things, and I can sneak things past my inner editor by promising to never, ever show anyone various things. (Which is why nobody ever sees the insides of any of my notebooks.)
Things I completely fail to have any talent for: clay sculpture, drawing, history, and architecture. These things all have common components. Therre is honestly something flawed in my brain about the physical world and the properties of space. I'm an alien, is all. :)