Drawing on your creativity
Saturday 9th September 2023
Hello friends,
Fundamental to life is breathing: without breath there is no life.
The most basic meditation technique is to focus merely on your own breath. Breathe in...breathe out, remembering that you are alive in this moment.
The creative life is no different. The whole purpose of creativity is that it keeps moving, flowing: breathe in, breathe out. Aspiring authors are encouraged to read widely, and to write something each day. Musicians to listen to music, and to play each day. Visual artists need to look closely, which means they need to draw.
during my training, I was asked whether I was drawing each day. I said that I was getting ideas for designs down, but just drawing things that I see? No, I wasn't. "So you're downloading but not uploading", came the reply, "be careful of that".
You see, observational drawing trains hand-and-eye. It builds up a bank of images in the back of the head. These can lie dormant, perhaps not popping up in your designs until years later, but to build a bank of them is essential for the designer.
At the moment in your craft, you may be mastering the basics. Getting things square, straight, symmetrical or even - whatever this looks like for you.
But I want to encourage you to play a longer game.
Even if you are currently developing your skills, the time will come when they are developed. But the question is, will you have a rich pool of ideas and images - that creative primordial soup - upon which to draw?
Will your work have an enticing, organic quality - designs that are not that far removed from the natural world and the material you work with?
Will you keep developing, changing, innovating?
Or will you keep on revisiting the same tired old concepts?
A drawing a day. It needn't be much - between five and twenty minutes drawing common household objects is fine. But a drawing a day is the goal.
Now…do I practice what I preach? No way! But it is a discipline I am looking to develop within myself. Remember, the purpose here is not to produce a 'good' drawing each day. It is the process that is important.
Take a household object, look at it carefully, draw it.
Look and draw
Breathe in, breathe out.
Who needs meditation?
~sh