Pictures And Words

To inspire I have decided to share with you the story of how I am learning to draw. I started to draw in Goa around 4 months ago. I had dabbled in drawing sketchy things a few times in the past, but never really locked on to anything and developed a style, mainly because I had never really felt any form of evolution within my drawings, and I have never drawn anything which I have enjoyed to look at, which I think is a very important point. I’ll say that juggling has given me an eye for change and evolution within my own actions. Seeing how when I juggle, I notice an improvement from the last day, a trick feels that little bit more natural, a bit more easier. So I set out drawing with this eye for change. At first I mainly put my attention to drawing words, since I was more familiar with words than drawing. I seemed to have an aim when I drew my words, adding little flairs and a chunkyness to the letters, I would stop when I felt like it felt good. All the words and sentences I was writing were just spur of the moment ideas, one liners that, to me, were interesting sounding. Free from any intention of making sense, or having to string together sentences to make a poem, or even a story, the words came quite freely. I quickly moved on from just words, and lately I have no desire to use words in my drawings at all, im quite content with drawing, my drawing skills have improved to the point where I can kind of draw what I have in mind, with a lot of effort and time that is.

Click on the pictures to get a supersized version

This is one of the words pictures I did, theres a few pictures squeezing in there.

Another words pictures, all words this time, and all animals!

I filled in the gaps with colours on photoshop, some would say kinda garish, but I have always liked to see lots of colours together like this.

After filling a few pages with words, and then squeezing in pictures in the gaps I noticed how satisfying it was to fill a whole page, and the overall effect was really good. So I put my mind to completely filling a page with as much detail as I could, I still enjoyed putting words in, so I included a few choice words. It took quite some time, but the overall effect was well worth it. It looks like a mammoth task, but each moment in the picture passed smoothly and enjoyably, to watch it grow was also very enjoyable. It just required patience and time.

I decided to draw a picture without words, just using abstract patterns, following simple rules and then to make it easier I repeated the pattern in quaters, so really I just had one fourth of an idea, much easier this way. I was very happy with the results and vowed to repeat this drawing style again.

So now I had quite a few nice pictures in my book, I could look to the first page and to the one I was currently drawing and see some kind of evolution. It was this improvement, this sense of acheivement which would drive me on to draw more. Its the sense of acheivment that we get from any aspect in life that encourages one to go onwards. I get a great sense of acheivement from computer games, specifically the ones where you improve something over times, for instance Role Playing Games like the Final Fantasy series, I really enjoy leveling up on that game. Also I enjoy Simcity and this type of game, building up something over times, big sense of achievement, it drives me on and on, its what drives us all on and on. So with my drawings in chronological order I gained a sense of improvement and achievement. I could also look back over what I had drawn for inspiration on what to draw next, since I already knew I could draw what I had already drawn!

If you look at the picture before the Mandala style picture you can see a small section at the top where its just dots, it kinda looks like stars, I thought that this looked very nice so I decided to repeat it and fill a whole page with dots. It took some time, but it the more dots I drew the more impressive the effect, nice sense of achivement so I pushed on. When people look through what I have drawn they often stop on this one, for me its not my favorite, but it does look impressive I know that much. I did get quite bored with it towards the end, even drawing completely other pictures before I added what I thought was the final dot.

I practise drawing everyday now, mainly I use ink, using a graphic design style pen, not a ballpoint. In Varanasi since my enjoyment in drawing was growing and growing I invested in some nice pens and I even bought some paint. I had a lovely room with a huge window, so I would spent my time sat under the window drawing and drawing. I did put my hand to drawing faces from photographs, I drew what I thought was a very acurate picture of myself from a photo I took. It took such a long time though, constantly erasing and redrawing the lines. Still though I tried other faces, and in one of my drawing books I have three faces I have drawn that for me look totally like what I was aiming for. With time and patience I feel like I can draw what I look at. However my prefered drawing style is more abstract, since im never really aiming for anything other than a nice shape, which means I can’t go wrong that much.

I started to play with paint after a while also, now this is a whole other world for me. More than just creating shapes you have to think about colour and how it works together, how to mix new colours and how to get the paint onto the paper, using a brush is an art in itself.

I started by just getting down colours I found appealing, and getting them down in an interesting shape, I then drew over the paint with ink for a nice effect.

Enjoying drawing more and more I decided to buy a professional pen, a Rotring Isograph, which is a refilable pen with a 0.1mm nib, for super detail. The first of these pens I bought I broke by drawing over paint! It blocked the pen and eventually after numerous cleaning a hair thin strand of metal came out of the end which was part of the valve to let the ink flood out, with that gone the ink either flooded out in an unctrolled way, or just didn’t come out at all. Since I wasn’t in the same town where I bought this beloved pen I ordered some and had them delivered to the post office of the town I was in! Extravagent but I have become quiet dedicated to drawing with this pen.

More of the ink over paint style, figuring out what works well. This is how I ruined the first Rotring pen I bought.

With the new ultra thin pen I bought I could cram more detail in, so I decided to do another Mandala style picture like the quatered picture up there. This time I decided to do it in 8ths. I was very happy with the way this picture turned out and it made me very enthusiastic to draw more like it.

So I drew more like it!

And more!

And even more, in fact I have so many of these now, and i’ve been giving them out as gifts, im very happy that people are very happy to recieve them, one friend even offered to pay me for one, but I couldn’t accept anything from a friend, since I feel that I could draw these things forever.

Whilst I was waiting for my new rotring pens to arrive I started to use these coloured pens, drawing lines and lines and lines. A very easy technique that required little skill just patience.

And thats some of what i’ve been up to of late. I have so many other drawings that I havn’t scanned in yet. When I get round to it ill be sure to post them on my Flickr account if not this site.