Funny what you find in old drawers…

So I’m deep into fixing and rebuilding my website.  This means that I go through and dredge up all of my old files and drawing drawers to see what I can make presentable to post and show off my abilities.  Its kinda funny what you find.  I find some old freelance jobs that I had totally forgotten about.  I find others that I wish I could have forgotten.

Sometimes I see old drawings and wonder, “did I really draw that?”  That reaction is either because its cringe worthy or in a surprisingly good way, its a forgotten treasure.  The latter has been occurring as I go through old college figure drawing studies.  They aren’t the best figure drawings in the world, but they are good enough for me to question whether I would still be able to draw like that.  I haven’t done figure drawing for years.  It makes me kick myself and scold myself for not keeping it up, kinda like the way you wish you would have kept up those piano lessons from when you were a kid.  I wonder where I could be in my figure skills if I would have kept it up.

Figure drawing is about as important a practice you can do as an artist.  It will help all aspects of your art whether you are drawing a monster, a horse, or even a car or building – figure drawing will make you better at it.  You may ask how drawing people well will help you draw a car well.  The answer is that figure drawing more than anything, will help you learn to see.  It will help you learn proportion, shape, shade, flow, and harmony.  It will help you learn beauty in all things, even imperfection.

I’m writing this post to myself as much as anyone.  I know that I need to set aside time each day to do more figure studies.  Hopefully I will kick myself enough to follow through.  I know it will benefit my work more than anything, even though I work in stylized art more than realistic.  You have to know reality before you can successfully bend it.