Sunday, January 2, 2011

Copying vs Freehand (without visual aids), a personal history

For some reason, I've never been able to draw freehand as well as I can from copying something in real life. It's always been this way for me, and I'm contemplating why that is because, well, I still don't know.

Two minutes after posting this, I realized that 'freehand' may be the wrong word!! All I mean is 'drawing without a visual aid'. Does anyone know a better word?

For example, when I was in first grade, the only 'real school' I ever had, I was given a blank bookmark to draw on, and for some reason, a Disney catalog, at the same time.
` On one side of the bookmark, I drew the talking Mickey Mouse doll from the catalog, along with Donald, Goofy and Pluto, who may or may not have also been dolls on the page, then added a stupid 'happy sun' and a rainbow.
` Pretty good for a six-year-old, huh?

1st grade 09 Disney character bookmark

That drawing was done, basically, by looking at the relative distances between the elements. Not only do I remember doing it this way, but there's also a comment among these papers from my teacher about my perspective-drawing ability; "Sarah draws what she sees, not what she knows -- table legs are longer in front and shorter in back."
` That is, indeed, how I drew pictures of tables in perspective, along with cars, and anything else that I was looking at.

But, in just plain freehand drawing, there is nothing to reference, unless you can visualize some picture just as vividly. I remember trying to do that when I was five, with an image of a rearing horse with wild purple hair, but I was never able to keep the image in my head long enough to draw it.

Moving on, let's look at the back of this same bookmark: I drew my own little scheme there, which unsurprisingly had to do with fighting and conflict and scariness, which were common themes in my life.
` Looks like the sun is freaking out because the duck pond with the winged frog is a battlefield for fire-breathing, laser-shooting cyborg monsters, which seem to have emerged from a most ominous cave.

1st grade 10 Back of the bookmark

Creative, yes, but the monsters are not nearly as well-formed as the Disney characters, presumably because I wasn't copying them from anything and thus, didn't quite know how to draw make them look realistic, which was usually what I was going for.
` I didn't copy very often, though, so I probably didn't notice this pattern back then.

Years later, when I was about 10 or 11, I was looking through a Christmas catalog at all the neat toys, and came across a photo of a puppy in one of the gift scenes. Since I was constantly drawing animals, I decided to copy it as closely as I could.
` I sat really still and did my best to duplicate the lines and the spaces that I was looking at, and the picture emerged:

6th grade 06 Puppy from catalog photo

That looks quite realistic, don't you think? At least, it doesn't look like a cartoon, which was how all my other drawings turned out, no matter how hard I tried.
` For example, this Mu-loo, a fictional animal I invented and loved to make look stupid and cute, could never have the realism I wanted:

3rd grade 26 Close up and personal with a Mu-loo

It still looks like a cartoon because I never figured out what a 'real' Mu-loo would actually look like. In other words, drawings of real things could look so real because I was able to look at their real-looking-ness!

When the movie Dumb and Dumber was released in 1994, I was 12 years old, and I must have been attending the last year of my 'special' education.
` When I saw Jim Carrey's face plastered across the cover of Nickelodeon Magazine, I simply had to make one of my own in order to poke fun of him:

no school 13 Jim Carrey...

I was somewhat impressed with that, and so, I was always disappointed to find that the best I could do without a picture was cartoons! Here's a parody of the neurotic people who had abused me in the last year of my 'special ed':

no school 01 Looking back on 6th grade

I had been hoping for photorealism to some extent, but it seemed as though I were incapable of that. Was Jim Carrey just a fluke? Why was it so realistic?
` Later on, I drew pictures of animals, copied from TV and books -- here are the most boldly-striped species of the genus Equus, a somewhat artificial grouping, collectively called zebras:

no school 86 Zebras!

I had trouble shading them, just because they're black and white, but otherwise, the stripes look 'correct' because I could just see how they went. However, I could not get the fictional hoofed animals, the Mu-loos to ever look like anything more than cartoons.
` Here, the Mu-loos have killed and stuffed their first pair of hunters, and have taken the hunters' trophies as part of their hunter-hunting re-enactment scene, with a 'hunter trophy' photo on the left, and at the table, Hunter Stew! (The end of the recipe is at top.)

no school 20 The Mu-loos eat the hunters!

That's pretty messed-up, isn't it? And I believe the two Mu-loos on the right are telling the story about how they bagged the hunters!
` Anyway, I tried my best to get everything looking like a photo, and once again, failed. I could never understand why sometimes my drawings looked fairly realistic and why they usually didn't, but at some point in time, I realized what the difference was.

Drawings copied from real life always looked accurate, because I had an accurate representation. But what of drawings from my mind? Apparently, my mind has just never been accurate.
` Today, at age 28, there is still a very marked difference between these two approaches. I wonder; is there any such way to stabilize an image in my mind so that a drawing from it looks like a drawing from real life? Would having a vivid imagination change that?

I can't say I've ever had a vivid imagination, because I was always being punished for thinking, for believing anything I saw in real life, and for playing 'let's pretend'. I remember always seeing the images in my mind shudder and warp, and for a while, I had none, save for dim memories.
` Perhaps that is the cause for this phenomenon? I don't know. I don't even know if psychologists have ever studied it, but I would be surprised if they haven't. Perhaps I will come across it someday.

For now, I'm just going to try training myself to see vivid images in my head, and we'll see what comes of it -- probably on this blog!

24 comments:

Unknown said...

Grand art, dear friend!

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I hope for you in 2011.

Spoony Quine said...

Thanks, Nick! You too, gosh knows you probably need it.

I don't know this, however, because every time I try to get over to Nick's Bytes, my browser freezes. Mayhaps it is more crowded with pictures and things than this blog?

Yang Kuo said...

Thanks, Nick! You too, gosh knows you probably need it.

I don't know this, however, because every time I try to get over to Nick's Bytes, my browser freezes. Mayhaps it is more crowded with pictures and things than this blog?



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