A small selection of works in conté done in first year. One of my biggest hurdles for going into design was and still is my lack of drawing skills. Every other person in my class seems to be a natural artist. I’m not. I can see, and I can imagine, but I have trouble putting that vision on paper well enough to satisfy myself. (Working in any media I can’t erase is petrifying.) I also have trouble with lighting. I can mostly tell when it’s wrong, not predict how to get it right. So when the other girls complained about our graphic presentation teacher marking too easily, and how it wasn’t worth doing good work for her, I wanted to shake them. You could tell from their tone that this stuff was child’s play for them, and that they had no idea how it would feel if drawing were difficult and scary to begin with, and doubly so because it ought to be perfect.
Since my opinion of my artwork is usually that it sucks, or at best is flawed — see this problem here and another one there — the professor telling me that it was good for a beginner (a.k.a. “easy marking”) was a really big help. It made it a little less scary to do the next assignment, because it was not going to come back covered in red ink.
One success made it slightly easier to try for the next, and you know what? By the end of the year, my drawings sucked a lot less than they used to. Some of them even look good to my ruthless perfectionist eyes. Obviously I needed (and still need) a big helping of confidence along with my drawing lessons, and I’m grateful to our professor for having given me some. After having seen how much I improved in a year and a half, even I have to agree that I can learn how to draw. And eventually, I may stop being scared of markers.
Conté Studies
Skillshand sketching & rendering
DateOctober 16, 2007
A small selection of works in conté done in first year. One of my biggest hurdles for going into design was and still is my lack of drawing skills. Every other person in my class seems to be a natural artist. I’m not.1 I can see, and I can imagine, but I have trouble putting that vision on paper well enough to satisfy myself. (Working in any media I can’t erase is petrifying.) I also have trouble with lighting. I can mostly tell when it’s wrong, not predict how to get it right. So when the other girls complained about our graphic presentation teacher marking too easily, and how it wasn’t worth doing good work for her, I wanted to shake them. You could tell from their tone that this stuff was child’s play for them, and that they had no idea how it would feel if drawing were difficult and scary to begin with, and doubly so because it ought to be perfect.
One success made it slightly easier to try for the next, and you know what? By the end of the year, my drawings sucked a lot less than they used to. Some of them even look good to my ruthless perfectionist eyes. Obviously I needed (and still need) a big helping of confidence along with my drawing lessons, and I’m grateful to our professor for having given me some. After having seen how much I improved in a year and a half, even I have to agree that I can learn how to draw. And eventually, I may stop being scared of markers.