It Could Be Worse!

The most recent art lesson I’ve reviewed at The Virtual Instructor has gone over the importance of drawing from life. When I first began learning to draw back in 2015, I spent a lot of time copying from books, such as Kate Berry’s “Drawing Lessons for Beginner Artists”. I moved on to other resources, but again my time was spent drawing from illustrations in books. Once I saw myself making progress, however, I ventured outside and attempted to draw the hostas growing around one of our trees.

Oh, my goodness! That was my first absolute failure. It was such a humiliating experience that I quickly ripped the pages from my sketchbook, crumpled them up, and threw them into the trash. For days I was hesitant to even pick up a pencil again.

Yes, drawing from life is very different from copying an illustration in a book or working from a reference photo. Life, as we know, comes at us in three dimensions, and our task as an artist is to convert those three dimensions to two. When we work with a reference photo or illustration, that conversion has already been done for us.

In time, I did learn to draw from life, although I always found it challenging. At the same time, I always found it enjoyable, especially when I was outside in nature drawing things like tree stumps, leaves, or interesting old sticks I’d found on the ground.

The lesson I was reviewing focused on still life drawing, and I took a deep breath and decided to give it a try. I was all out of apples, so I grabbed three clementines, set them out on our kitchen table and made my best attempt to get the approximate sizes of each, the distances between them, and some sense of the lighting. To add to my lack of practice, I’m now experiencing vision problems that have left me with blurred vision in my left eye, so at the moment, drawing from life is even more challenging that it might otherwise be.

What surprised me, I think, is that I still found the process very enjoyable. I do like to sit with a pencil in hand, making marks, just doing my best. It’s not very good, and, of course, I made no effort whatsoever to re-create the lace pattern of the tablecloth. Instead, I just added a few diagonal lines. Don’t laugh — but this is what I came up with:

Oh, all right. Go ahead and laugh. It’s not very good, but all things considered, it could be worse! You can see that I’m definitely out of practice on hatching/shading techniques, and I didn’t concern myself to trying to show any texture. For me this exercise was all about looking at shapes and sizes, noticing negative space between objects, and just spending a few quiet minutes with pencil and paper, drawing something from life.

And what’s most important here is that I really enjoyed doing this. Despite the imperfections, despite the flaws, even despite the visual challenge of a blurry eye, I had fun doing this. It’s not great, but I never expected it to be. It’s really not even good, but that’s all right with me.

I did my best, and I enjoyed it.