Tag: Opinion

I can’t draw.

As a class, we had watched a TED talk by Graham Shaw in which he was talking about peoples perceptions about drawing. In this talk, he discusses how everyone can draw its basically just your own doubts that prevent you from doing so or improving your skills. In the talk, he does give a follow along example explaining his theory in which he gets the audience to draw characters with him, resulting in a lot of people realising they can draw. I am not going to show my results from the experiment as I just feel they’re a mess. They were fine in the beginning but then they just went downhill quick. I believe this was because I don’t work as fluid as Shaw does with his characters, so was more focused on trying to get the lines right and when he was onto the next steps, I had already created a mess. So no, I will not be showing my results, but I definitely think the talk is worth a watch and you may be intrigued to see what you could create, especially if you are one of those people who think you cannot draw.

I feel when people use this quote of “I can’t draw”, which usually follows “omg, you’re so good, I can’t even draw a…” they just assume that it is a natural gift that you must have been born with. This at least was not the case for myself. When I was younger, I don’t believe I was good at drawing but I did enjoy the process so I just kept going. I am quite a perfectionist with my work, and always have been, a trait which I believe I’ve gained from my Mum, thanks, mum! so after making a drawing, I would usually get disheartened when I could see the issues, but this wouldn’t stop me from drawing entirely, I would just try to keep improving.

In my teens, I would regularly use a site called DRAGOART, which I believe is still active to this day, and posts step by step tutorials of how to draw certain characters, icons, images, etc, which are usually inspired by current trends with the media and pop culture. From these tutorials, I would be able to draw the image quite well, but I would focus more on trying to replicate the image as opposed to actually trying to learn from the process. So, once I had noticed this when I would try to draw something that wasn’t from the tutorial,  I did start to try learning from the process, specifically from the beginning steps in which you form the image using shapes. From this day I believe this is still how I work, but over time I have improved my skills by learning the fundamentals of art first, and a lot of practice, more from real life or proper reference photos, as opposed to working from someone else characters/art. In my opinion, as an artist, you should never stop learning or improving or wanting to learn or improve. I feel if you reach the point where you think that you have nothing more to learn or no more areas for improvement, then there would be no purpose for creating work. You would have reached your peak, where else would there be to go from there?

I myself know that I have a lot of areas to improve within my work, and a lot of new techniques and mediums that I want to explore, and although things may not work out, I will be excited to see how my art grows within the next 10 years, or 5 or 1, or even just within a couple of months. Below I have shown two illustrations of mine, the one on the left being one I had made in 2013 when I was 14-15? I remember how proud I was of it at the time, but looking back now, I’m sooooo happy with how much my work, style and aesthetic has grown since, especially when looking at the piece on the right, from late 2018, where I have drawn a more anatomically correct and more aesthetic character of my own, instead of just imitating someone else’s.

In conclusion, from watching the TED talk, I do believe that anyone can draw, they’ve just got to be willing to put the doubts aside and put the time into it for it to look as “good” as someone else’s they may compliment. I can’t think of any artist who was just magically gifted at their craft, at least not with a little practice at first. If I try to think about it in other terms, you don’t just learn maths overnight, you practise and practise over the space of basically 16 years, and once you’ve mastered counting, you then go on to adding, subtracting, timetables, division, then algebra gets thrown in and all sorts of equation stuff. So with this example, an artist is always improving, but it does take that understand and practice in order to do so.

Bibliography

Dragoart.com. (2016) How to Draw, Draw Step by Step.. [online] Available at: https://www.dragoart.com/ [Accessed 6 Feb. 2019].

Garner, C. (2017). Why Should You Study The Fundamentals of Art?. [online] Medium. Available at: https://medium.com/the-art-squirrel/why-should-you-study-the-fundamentals-of-art-1368efcbf446 [Accessed 6 Feb. 2019].

Shaw, G. (2015). Graham Shaw: Why people believe they can’t draw. Available from: https://www.ted.com/talks/graham_shaw_why_people_believe_they_can_t_draw [Accessed 6 Feb. 2019]

All images are my own unless stated otherwise.

Foiling

Following yesterdays class and blog post about screen printing, in the class, we had also learned how to foil your designs using that method, but I wanted to make a separate post about it as I have also used another technique for foiling in the past and wanted to discuss and compare the two methods.

Screen Printing

In yesterday’s blog post I did discuss the process of creating the screen and printing with it, so if this is something you are interested in or would like to know more about, please click here. So, following this process, instead of using printing medium, we used glue instead. By doing this, you did have to be more thorough with the cleaning of your screen, washing it as soon as possible because if you were to leave it to long, it could potentially dry and clog up your screen, making it unusable. Once the glue was printed onto the page, you would then choose a foil, which had come in multiple colours and tones, but for my piece, I had chosen to use a copperish colour. You would then place a sheet of your chosen foil over the glued sections, the colour/reflective side facing upwards, then sandwhiching the page and foil inbetween sheets of scrap paper, you then put it into the heat press for 30-60 seconds. Once you have removed this sandwich from the heatpress, wait for it to cool down slightly, then when you peel away the foil, it should have stuck to the glue and should reveal your design underneath.

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Using a normal printer.

A while back, I had decided to make my mam a present which was based on a map of the areas where she has lived in her life. I had seen places online like ‘Not on the Highstreet’ doing this with a foiling effect, but instead of paying quite a bit of money for it, I decided I would just try to do it myself instead, using the facilities available to me within the college. At that time, I had no idea how I would go about making this effect, so I had gone to see Steph within the print room for her advice. She had suggested a technique where you would just print out the line work using a normal printer, then the foil would stick to it when under the heat press. So, after creating my line work, I printed it out onto a sheet of good paper with the normal printer in her room, I cut a sheet of foil which was big enough to cover the area of the design, then again, sandwiched the page and foil between sheets of scrap paper and placed it into the heat press for 30-60 seconds. Once done, I removed the foil and it had stuck down to the areas that were black in my design.

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My opinion.

Although using the normal printer was a lot more efficient on time, and was a lot less messy as you didn’t have to worry about glue and cleaning screens etc, it did give a more subtle effect, as the foil appeared to be more crackled as opposed to full like I had achieved with the screen printing method. Overall I did have good experience with both techniques, however, if I were to use it again within my work, these would be factors that I have to consider, would I want the effect to be more subtle and still be able to make out the black line work underneath, or would I want the effect to be more solid?

All images are my own unless stated otherwise. Appologies that they may not best show the reflective qualities of the foil, I was going to upload a video, however this site thought otherwise.