Sunday Offering

While doing my daily drawings, I decided I wanted to draw a tiger. However since it is the drawing that takes you where it wants to go, the tiger ended up making its way out of a jungle. There appeared a house in the distance and a figure beside it. Is the tiger moving towards a kill? Is the tiger coming home for an evening snack? It is for you to decide.

And in the photograph below, a tiger fiercely guards his territory with his paw.

Drawing Daily

I don't SKETCH from life as regularly as I used to and that was bothering me because I believe regular sketching is as important as practicing scales on the piano. It HONES your skills tremendously. Sometime ago another artist Rick Beerhorst, who makes very beautiful work, spoke about how he planned to do 5 drawings every single day. This is easier said than done. There is always something SEEMINGLY MORE IMPORTANT that beckons, especially when running a house (I have to buy eggs!) and there is the eternal lure of the internet. Nobody understands the tremendous amount of SELF DISCIPLINE it takes to be self-employed. But once you start drawing, simply drawing, everything else falls away. Even deadlines can wait. Drawing is a form of meditation.

I am using ordinary sketchbooks here and drawing with the local Sudha brand of charcoal. It makes me less self-conscious about the drawing so I have more fun. If I use my special Canson sketchbook or more special Moleskine sketchbook, I still have fun because the paper is so wonderful to work on, but there is the grim determination at the back of my mind that every single drawing should be a frikking masterpiece. That can sometimes become a problem when you want to try and push your drawing skills further, so for my 5 3 drawings a day exercise it is these Chinese sketchbooks that I do them in. The paper is good enough and the books look nice. If I manage to keep at my daily drawing, I will have done some 90 drawings by the end of this month, maybe more, and hopefully one day I can just whip out human figures with far more ease than I can now.

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NIGHT
Lying awake at night sometimes – not restlessly, but serenely, waiting for sleep – the quiet re-establishes itself piece by piece; all the broken bits, all the fragments we’ve been busily dispersing all day long re-establishes itself, an inward quiet; it fills one, it grows… it becomes more perfect. It is beautiful and terrifying…

~ Aldous Huxley

How to get out of your own way by Julia Cameron

To Keep on Drawing

I simply love my Canson sketchbook. All the dry mediums - pastel, charcoal, coloured pencils work wonderfully in it and the feel of the medium on the paper makes me want to keep on drawing endlessly. Some of these pictures are taken from instagram feeds I follow where when I've liked a picture, I borrow the subject and end up making it my own by experimenting in my sketchbook. Most of these are explorations of shape and texture and colour, but hopefully in up coming blog posts, I'll have something more conceptual to show.

I've probably added this quote below in an earlier blog post, but I'd like to include it here again, more as a reminder to myself about how important it is to simply keep on drawing ~

If I had a single piece of advice to offer to any artist, it would be this: whatever your practice or medium, draw constantly. Be like the dancer, who never lets a day go past without a class. Draw as much as you can, wherever you can. Draw from observation (of course) but draw for practice too, from memory or from imagination, mark-making for precision or beauty-of-line alone, regardless of subject or likeness. Draw with pencil, with nibbed-pen, with charcoal or crayon or Conté pencil or biro. Draw with brushes and inks, or twigs dipped in watercolour or with old toothbrushes or the tips of feathers. Draw with anything. Subvert habit with new experience. Drawing can be for recording, but more than that it’s an expressive form that can be endlessly reinvented. Keep project-books and work at them even when the spirit doesn’t move you. Work in them out of discipline and respect for your art-form. They’re money in the bank for later, when you need the inspiration stored in them. Draw. Draw again. Never stop drawing.

Drawing is life.

~ Clive Hicks-Jenkins