Yay for YouTube!
This was my Spirit Calling Card reading this morning.
Indeed! Being a beginner at drawing, I have sometimes felt overwhelmed and not equipped to handle what I’ve been asked to do in class. I’ll admit, part of it is definitely psychological – I’ve already talked about my baggage when it comes to drawing. I’m still working on that, and I’m happy to report that there’s great progress!
Being a beginner has also been a great blessing. The fact that I’m so much less experienced than the others and that I am missing many of the very basic skills that we aren’t covering in class ( ex: how to hold a pencil for drawing, how to make pencil strokes, etc.) has propelled me into a whole self-study program before and after classes, thanks to the Internet.
Since Sunday, I’ve been spending an extra 2-4 hours a day on YouTube with a whole bunch of teachers learning about and practicing everything from how to hold a pencil, the different kinds of pencils, the dimensions of “the ideal superhero”, to human anatomy for professional artists so that I can better understand how those muscles wrap around the bones and affect the light/shadows on a human figure. The artist/ teacher in that last video enjoys dissecting bodies to deepen his understanding – not something I’m willing to do! I did try to examine my own arms in the mirror this morning, but alas, they look more like the cylinders on the drawing mannequins; therefore, they aren’t teaching me much about biceps and triceps…. except maybe that I could develop mine… Anyhow, I can now understand how some of my friends can stay up all night watching YouTube videos – it’s not all silly time-wasters. It’s become an integral part of my artistic education! To think that when I last lived in Europe (Czech Republic in 1994), I didn’t even have email (nor did most people)! Now I can simply search for teaching videos on almost anything or Google “Klimt drawings” and spend an hour looking at hundreds of his sketches to see a bit of his creative process and other styles of quickly rending the human body on paper – very encouraging!
So here are a few photos of my progress in the last 3 days. It’s so far from where I want to be, but oh so far from where I was just a week ago. It’s all good … and all relative!
And this is my class in a park where we spent an hour and a half observing and drawing water droplets… not so easy!
Life is definitely teaching me to appreciate the challenges I am experiencing as a beginner and all the opportunities for growth and learning they provide.
Good for you. What will be really interesting will be to see what you do at the end compared to now!