Hi dear artist friends!
I made a sketchbook tour video of my travel in Portugal beginning of August and I also show the art supplies I traveled with.
You can watch below if you like and subscribe to my You Tube channel. I decided to make more tutorial video’s…
I had a wonderful holiday in Portugal, with a quite productive amount of sketches, thinking of my new book I’ll make with Maison Akinome.
I didn’t find the story yet I want to tell in the book, but starting a sketchbook is a great way to “Start Before You’re Ready” and to get the creative juices flowing, because as Picasso said (I think it was him anyway?) “Inspiration will come, but it has to find you working”!
The question that came up in the YouTube Live organized by Arttoolkit last Tuesday with the Sneaky Artist is: how do you keep those juices flowing when you’re back home? The Sneaky Artist had a great tip: stay CURIOUS !
Staying curious and play as if you were on holiday is rather difficult when we’re at home in our day to day life. You have to give yourself the PERMISSION to wander around with your sketchbook, and find a way to do it a bit every day. Your sketchbook will that way give you the gift of time !
If you do a bit every day, and find the way YOU like to draw and which colors YOU like, it leads to finding your “style”.
Staying curious at home like on holiday makes us more mindful in every day life.
Some other nuggets of wisdom he shared about that mindfulness when we draw, is to draw what’s in front of you without acknowledging what it is. Like I already wrote about before when I wrote about drawing with the right side of the brain (Betty Edwards): we’re just drawing a bunch of lines. Look carefully in what direction the lines are going and put that onto paper with long lines (without lifting the pen of the paper too much). When you do that, you don’t allow agitation to paralyze you and you make your rational left side of the brain shut up! Try to draw with accuracy. Don’t be sloppy. If you’re telling your’self you’re drawing a face, your left brain will make you draw faces the way you think they are, and not the face you’re looking at.
Our brain is very powerful…
Another interesting thing he talked about, is what I heard before in a workshop in Malaga with Miguel Herranz and it’s always a nice reminder: draw the way you write! In other words: if you can write, you can draw. Writing, like drawing, is a combination of lines going in different directions. Drawing with a long line (not a “hairy” interrupted line) seems to be the best way to draw like yourself and find your personal style.
And last but not least: copying other artists to try out new techniques is OK. That’s what workshops and courses are for. That’s what artists have been doing since forever.
Have a wonderful end of the summer!
