Drawing From The Heart

Everybody can draw, although most people have been taught to believe that they can’t.

The best way to discover the visual artist within yourself is to chuck out a couple of things, starting with that crippling sense of inadequacy, followed by the wrong idea that representational drawing (drawing that ‘accurately’ represents or portrays things in the physical world) is the ‘best’ or ‘proper’ way to draw.

All that nonsense has got to go.

Drawing is about what’s inside you, not what’s ‘out there’.

The best way to start drawing is to start drawing. And to do that, you need some drawing materials. Luckily, they are cheap and easily available. All you need is some A3 bond (photocopy) paper, or, if you prefer, an A3 sketch pad consisting of cartridge paper, which is a step up from bond. Rather stick to A3, as A4 is going to cramp your style. To draw with, you need some pencils. The most commonly used pencil is the HB, but I would recommend trying softer pencils, like a 4B, or even a 6B. For the exercise I am about to describe, you will also need some artist’s charcoal sticks. These can be purchased from any art shop, or, if you are very skint, next time you have a braai, grab a couple of chunks of charcoal, preferably wood charcoal, not briquettes. Another great drawing instrument to experiment with is the brush. Professional cartoonists use sable brushes, but these are expensive, so any other small brush with a fine point will do. The brush can be used with Indian ink or acrylic ink, also available from any art shop.

Now here is an adaptation of an exercise that I did with the graphic narrative group at the CDRA Biennial. The purpose of the exercise is to search for the artist deep inside you.

You will need an hour and a half, or preferably two and a half hours, of uninterrupted quiet time, an uncluttered flat surface to work on, some A3 paper, and some pencils, a rubber, a pencil sharpener, a few sticks of charcoal and a bottle of ink. We are going to work in black, grey and white only, so don’t worry about crayons, watercolours or markers. You will also need a glass of water, a saucer to mix ink and water in, and some toilet roll to use for blotting and wiping up if you spill. 

If you’re ready, let’s begin. The first part of the exercise is to get to know the materials you are going to work with. So spend half an hour or an hour experimenting. Don’t worry about what shapes you are going to draw, just concentrate on the different kinds of lines and the different tones and textures you can achieve with your materials. Place a couple of drops of ink in the saucer and add some water. This is called an ink wash. Now dip your brush into it and experiment with different shades of grey, by adding more (or less) water to the wash. Similarly, mess around with your charcoal. Use your fingers to spread the charcoal over the paper. Place some fine sand under the paper to get a grainy effect. Combine ink wash with charcoal tones. Then work over these with pencil and ink. Once you feel you have a sense of the possibilities of your materials, you are ready to begin the main part of the exercise.

Go into the garden or the street and find a small object – a stone, or a leaf, or a piece of stick. Avoid complicated objects with lots of bits sticking out – the simpler the better.

Now go and grab a great book. It could be a holy book or a book of poetry or a prayer book – books that contain meditative or contemplative writing are best for this kind of thing. But if you can’t find one, even the newspaper will do.

Now settle down in your quiet place and make sure that you are going to be able to work without being interrupted.

Once you have settled down with your object and your drawing materials and your book, take a few deep breaths, try and block off the outside world, and start looking at your object. Look at it for a few long minutes. Look at it more closely and more carefully than you’ve ever looked at anything in your entire life. Look past its external shape, into it. Look at the patterns and grains and shadows and veins and squiggles and shapes that lie within the object.

While you are doing this, allow yourself to be open to the feelings and emotions that come into you, but don’t concentrate on them and for goodness sake don’t name them. (If a sad feeling comes upon you, don’t say to yourself “I feel sad”. That just makes the feeling go away.) We need all these feelings to be in an unnamed, unformulated state.

Now pick up you charcoal and start drawing what you see when you look closely at your object. You can work as big as you like – ten times, fifty times, bigger that the object. Magnify all the little details and squiggles and funny rough looking bits and smooth watery looking bits. Use your fingers to smooth out the surface of your picture where you want it to be smooth. Wet your fingers if you need to. If you want a gravely texture, put some sand under the paper and rub the charcoal over it for a gravely effect.

If you suddenly get an idea, follow it through. Once you are tired, put the picture aside. Take a few minutes to stroll around, allowing all the artistic feelings that the process of drawing has aroused in you a bit of time to settle down. But keep the feeling. Don’t let your thoughts stray. This artistic feeling is your most important achievement so far.

Now grab a new piece of paper. You are going to make a drawing right in the middle of the paper. It is going to be smaller that the drawing that you have just done. It is important that it should be surrounded by white space, especially above and below it, so it is probably better to work with portrait format (tall) rather than landscape format (wide).

Now, using everything that you have learnt, make another drawing of your object, based on the drawing that you have just done. You don’t have to spend lots of time on it. Be quick and confident in the making of your marks, if you can. Extend and develop the ideas you have already come up with. Play with the details and tones and textures. You are an artist, and every decision you make is an artistic decision.

Once you have finished the drawing, put it to one side.

Now pick up your book. Close your eyes and sit quietly with your eyes closed for a moment. Now, still with your eyes closed, open the book. Open your eyes briefly, just long enough to orientate yourself. In front of you should be a page of text. Close your eyes again and jab your forefinger onto the page of text. Now open your eyes and, using your writing instrument, very neatly write the sentence you jabbed – that sentence, only that sentence and no other sentence – neatly below your picture.

Now take one word from the sentence you have just written and write it neatly in capital letters above your picture. Now place your signature or mark somewhere under or next to the picture.

Voila! You have created an artwork! As deeply meaningful and full of mystery as any artwork ever before created!

Now you have two choices.
1. Look carefully at your artwork for a few minutes, memorising every detail. Then scrumple it up and throw it away in the bin.
2. Put it in a safe place.

But whatever you do, don’t you dare show it to anybody!

Being an artist is a mysterious business. Respect the mystery of creation.

(drawing yourself)

GOOD LUCK!

 

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