Corner of Bourbon & Division

I've been doing some practising in my spare time, doing a few of the exercises from Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, and I have concluded that artists are magic. I'm not giving up or anything, because after all it's only been a couple of weeks and expecting any sort of good result after that short a period of time is ridiculous, but I am ever more in awe of people who can render on paper what they see in front of them or, even more impressively, what they see in their minds. Right now, even when I work with a grid and try to go line by line and stroke by stroke, my efforts look nothing like the reference I'm using. I drew a couple of pigeons the other day (it was a Twitter joke, don't ask), and one pigeon looked pretty pigeon-like, and the other looked like a canary with the wrong colour plumage. Eesh. So, you know, recognisably a bird, but nothing like the reference picture I'd found.

Part of my frustration stems from the fact that drawing people is one of the hardest things to do, and yet that's what I'd like to be able to accomplish. I am not a patient person, never have been, and it is dancing on every single one of my nerves that I can't seem to make my hands reproduce what my brain envisions. It's also a bit discouraging to know that I'm never truly going to attain the level of skill that I want to have. For one, my talents don't lie in the visual arts. I'm quite sure I can improve to the point of being decent or even more than decent, but my true talents have always lain within the written word. Not that that's a bad thing, but every now and then I have this wistful longing to be a "proper" artist like my mother, or like so many of my friends.

Anyway, in the meantime I shall keep plugging along. I'm only a fraction of the way into Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, mostly because the exercises are a) time-consuming and b) require a lot of concentration, and since I have very little time and even less concentration these days, it's difficult for me to do them. I'm at the stage of blind contour drawing, and I'm finding that my lack of patience is a serious hindrance. The last exercise calls for drawing a crumpled piece of paper and spending at least an hour on it, and I have not managed that. If I "blindly" follow the lines I see and really, really take my time, I can spend about 20 minutes to half an hour on it, and then I've reached the end of the lines. I'm not sure how I'm supposed to stretch that into an hour of drawing. /o\

On the plus side, it is nice to have some creative pursuits. I am still failing at writing anything remotely approaching good lately, and so it's easier to draw badly than to write badly. At least I already know I draw badly, whereas when I write badly it depresses me because I know I'm capable of doing better. Bah. Also, I can have fun looking up reference pictures on the internet. So many pretty pictures!