Drawings

~leeksoup

I signed up for a drawing class this year at the local worker's institute. The autumn semester is over for now, and I've really liked it! Two of my friends also joined the same class, which makes it that much more fun to go, since I get to socialise with them. Seeing your friends in an adult life becomes saddeningly difficult as time goes on.

My friends have wildly different drawing styles and things they focus on, so comparing our drawings is a lot of fun.

It's a quite open-ended concept - the class visits different places in the city, and you draw whatever you like from the vicinity. The teacher comes periodically to discuss your progress, your subject, and making observations and giving tips to the drawing. She's a really pleasant and encouraging person, and I quite like the concept of the class. The class also makes sure I actually draw sometimes, it's something I like to do but often forget about. It also lets me observe the city and figure out new aspects about it.

We visited a plaza near the harbour, where I drew a surprisingly challenging industrial crane. At the riverside, I drew the background scene framed by the curve of a bridge. In the cathedral, I drew the big and imposing organ. At the train station, I drew the building complex an acquaintance lives in, and thought of the barbecue party I've been to there. And last time, I drew the nearby Orthodox church visible from the rooftop bar we visited.

It's a lot of scenes and buildings, but occasionally other stuff too. It's stuff I rarely draw, I typically draw one subject in focus and neglect the whole background and stuff. It's also given me reason to care about perspective more.

The teacher observed at the last session that I've improved very quickly in both speed and in developing my own style. I took it as general encouraging words, but when she told me to flip back to my earlier drawings and have a look, I realised that she was onto something. Certainly my speed has improved. I still feel like I'm strapped for time, but I end up getting a lot more done, in terms of detail, before I start hurrying in the very end. And for style, well, turns out I really like strong contrasts between light and dark. The 7B pencil has seen a lot of use casting things into utter darkness. And compositionally, I feel like I am beginning to grasp better how things are places in relation to one another.

For next year, I have two areas I want to focus on:

1) Drawing people

A typical scene in the city will include people. I haven't bothered thus far, not liking how difficult I find it to draw them. But I gotta start including them in my scenes.

I've found some useful videos and practices to get something done about that. I made a lot of sketches of poses today, to try to capture stances and motion onto paper. I'll try to keep that as a big focus in December. It went surprisingly okay today.

2) Using colour pencils

I really like colour pencils. I have a lot of them, and I've bought some really fancy ones with beautifully strong pigments, and I would like to use them. But my drawings are primarily pencil drawings. I need to start incorporating colour. As the teacher told me, all I need is the courage to just do it. And that's true. I just need to do it. I want to capture the contrasts I like to highlight, but using colour. We'll see how it goes.

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One thing I'm looking forward to is to travel to Poland next year. I will be visiting Kraków with one of my friends, who is also in the drawing class with me. I suggested we could do the same city scene drawing thing there too, bringing along our pens and sketchbooks. It could be really fun! And it's a good way to appreciate some closer details in the city, stuff you wouldn't otherwise notice. I'm excited to see what it's like, I haven't been anywhere in Poland before.

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At work, I've occasionally doodled some things, and colleagues come to tell me they like them. Sure thing. But there's one comment that really bothers me. "You're so talented, I could never draw something like that."

And, like, yes actually, you could. It's all down to practice. That comment just rubs me wrong since it signals that my colleagues won't even bother trying themselves, and they gate themselves to expect results at a level not yet achievable if they did. I've tried telling them my view of things: "Talent is a lie, there is only work", but to little avail.

Some people challenge me on that, that talent exists and that people are differently talented at different things. But that rather misses the point I'm trying to communicate.

Sure, some people can intuit visual information and transfer it onto paper better than others, giving them an easier time learning to draw, just like someone else has an ear for musical details, someone navigates social situations with grace and yet another can calculate and logic out complex problems with remarkable speed. But none of those people are immune to the fact that they, too, must do work to achieve their level of skill, and to maintain it.

Borrowing terminology from video games, sure, "talent" exists in the meaning of "leveling up in a skill easier than others", but evencwith that talent, you still need to grind EXP to level up, just like everyone else.

And if my colleagues do not themselves care for drawing or learning to draw, that's their choice and their freedom to do what they want, they will dedicate their time and practice for the things they in turn care about. But I'd personally think it'd be nice if people didn't say "I could never do that" as a comment to other people's work. Say something else. I myself changed the phrasing of an "I am bad at X" thing earlier in this post, specifically with this point in mind.

But I am also way overthinking a comment made in passing at some doodles I've made at work.