Monday, 6 September 2010

Draw EVERY Day!












So an old teacher and once good friend of mine challenged me this summer to get back into sketchbooks, sticking to this simple rule, ‘draw every day’. We both purchased cheap(ish!) A5 sketchbooks and tried to get into the habit of swapping and critiquing each other’s collections whenever we met up. The results, were surprisingly, good!

Having been a grumpy participant in a similar exercise in art school (I hate observational drawing) I was quite taken aback at my enjoyment in this journalistic process. I think because our little project removed the idea of a sketchbook being merely a record of observations. Undoubtedly, drawing everyday will improve technique but it was the liberation, the spontaneity and simplicity, which really got me hocked. Less concerned with treating the book as gage of artistic endurance I literally took to it like a teenagers diary, and drew what ever I felt like, spending as long on it as I desired on each day (Sometimes 5 mins sometimes 2 hours), briefing each entry with a simple stream of consciousness approach. Inspiration came from the situations and places I found myself in, yes, but also from moods, from a song which wouldn’t let me sleep, a movie which had crawled under my skin or a haphazard picture that presented itself in a Sunday copy of my dad’s beloved Daily ‘Bigot’ Mail.

Always slightly anxious about a recent reliance on labour intensive line drawing I also found the simple rule of HAVING to draw in the book at some point daily, meant that I sometimes returned to a far more spontaneous usage of mark making and mediums to convey a thought. Something I have always felt difficult to marry to recent detailed, line work. It also made me appreciate when the lines really work!

Anyway…It had always been my idea to approach the blog in a similar fashion, so I will endeavour to post a new drawing everyday!…Or at least, as much as possible. In the mean time here are some of my favourite scans from the summer sketchbook, named by my studio mate as ‘Keith’. Don’t ask.

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