Re: Honing Your Craft

To be honest, I'm not really furthering my skills in my spare time. I'm usually sleeping or watching Netflix. I know that I should, but since I started this program, I basically am doing as much as I can just to get my projects done on time while also working and trying to get some sleep every now and then. When I do have time, I end up wanting to do something that doesn't require much thought--hence, Netflix.

When I have an idea for a project that I'm not sure how to do but know that it can be done with Illustrator/Photoshop, I'm Googling those tutorials like everyone else. But I do have something to contribute to this conversation--I promise. I definitely think that I've been helped along in the program and my work because I can draw at least moderately well. I also definitely think that everyone can learn to draw.

While some people have natural talent, and some probably don't have as much, learning to draw is really more about re-learning to see than anything else, and there are things you can do to help yourself improve. When I was teaching high school English and trying to decide if I could do something more visual, less verbal, for a living, I took an intro drawing class at a local arts center. I hadn't really taken an art class since middle school so I had no idea what I was doing. One of our first classes, the instructor gave us an exercise from Betty Edwards's Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain: She showed us a poster-sized print of Picasso's portrait of Igor Stravinsky and told us we were going to reproduce it; then, she turned it upside-down:

Here's a write-up from a blogger who did the same exercise from the book, which is also where I got the image.

The previous class, she'd asked us to draw a tree, and many of the drawings had looked like clip-art/kids drawings of trees with a straight trunk and a blob for the leaves, so she'd realized that many of us were stuck in the verbal/sign-making-and-recognizing/meaning-making part of our brains. Bringing in the Stravinsky exercise forced us to ignore the meaning part of our brains and focus on the purely visual--the shapes and lines in the image, not what the generic concepts of "nose" or "legs" or "eyes with glasses."

For me, that exercise still probably has the most impact of anything that I've done to improve my drawing or graphics skills. I think just working/playing/doodling/practicing your old-school pen/ink/charcoal/paint-and-paper skills will help in the long run as much as any of the tutorials online, which are certainly helpful in the moment when you have a specific idea of what you want to do. Improving your physical skills can change the way you think and see, though, so that can give you infinitely more ideas to begin with. Then it's a matter of learning tricks of the programs, which sites like Lynda.com can help with.

Along with Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, I've also found Lynda Barry's work to be tremendously helpful. Her books What It Is and Picture This: The Near-Sighted Monkey Book both present writing and visual art in an approachable memoir-like narrative with pages full of creative work. They're like primers in how to be creative, and present a pretty different version of how to draw, respecting individual choice and the process of finding a style or voice of your own. She also has a Tumblr page for a course she teaches at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, which includes some interesting, fun, creative and sometimes not-too-time-consuming exercises.

As to a common cold, I'm a big believer in the old-school sleep & lots of fluids method. I know sleep can't always happen the way we might like, especially with full-time work and classes, but it helps. Also, hot water, one bag of green tea, one bag of mint/peppermint tea, plus honey, and repeat.