Back to Art

My last previous attempt at art was probably a few months ago. It was such a pathetic attempt at couple of portraits and I was so out of practice I felt that I had regressed to pre-Hala tutoring phase. Actually, I don't think it was even that bad. It was probably worse.

I felt right handed, which, mind you, to a left handed person means clumsy. The good news however, that while my skills had somewhat deteriorated, I'd noticed the more I drew, the faster I improved, much faster than when I was learning this stuff for the first time. I breathed a sigh of relief at the time. With practice, I could be really good again.
Of course, I didn't practice. Between piano, obsessive reading, researching random things, and school work, art took a backseat in free time land.

I started up again today. You want to know what made me do it? A Van Gogh painting. I'd bought some pastel and coloring pencils many months ago which were still in their wrappers. Soft pastel is messy, so without newspapers and a nice big table to draw on, I'm just asking for powdery colorful trouble to land on the carpet. Coloring pencils it was.
I drew and colored the picture below inspired by a photo I'd taken. Now, the drawing is half-way decent, and if you take an up close and personal view of it, you'll notice my pencil coloring technique sucks. Actually, I'm pretty sure it's nonexistent. I color like a ten year old.
You may ask, why am I showing you this? Well, I really like the colors, and I plan to do a proper expanded version of this in the future with watercolor or oil. I can already see it: a really black rotting background, spidery white spikes beside the thorns coming out of the green part of the flower, the whole drawing polished and drawn with better detail, and the colors more intense. A wild flower coming out of a vicious dark world!





I finally figured out what my problem is. There's a lot of times when I feel *inspired* with an artistic idea, but it goes away quickly. Then there are other times when I want to draw and paint but I feel uninspired.
This way, I can use mediocre pencil coloring to quickly jot down drawings and color plans before the feeling goes away. Then when I have the urge to really sit down and work at painting, I don't have to wrack my brain for ideas. I can open my idea drawing notebook and pick a project.

Sometimes I feel I'm a sad case of great ideas and little skill. I have wanted for years now to be able to draw non-realistic humans. Sort of cubism meets Gauguin meet Van Gogh's screaming girl. Problem is I can draw none of the three styles. Hmm, I should probably first copy a relevant painting from each artist before trying to make up my own! I remember my friend who was taking an art class. Their teacher had them copy different styled paintings from great painters. I'm sure there could be huge potential benefit in such an exercise.

Well, enough musings for a night. I'm off to bed.