I’m a busy mom, and I have limited time each day to work on art. This is okay, and good even, because it means that the time I do spend has to have a high impact. Or at least, I want it to have a high impact, because I want to either maintain my art skills or get better.
When I was working up to the long distances that I run, I used to go for 5 or 7 mile meandering runs around my neighborhood in Maryland and DC. I didn’t have a time limit or goal, I just wanted to go for a run.
One day though, I decided I wanted to run 6 miles in 60 minutes. I did this on a treadmill at a gym. I didn’t even know I would be able to do it, but I did.
The impact this single goal had on me was higher than any of those other meandering “Oh I guess I’ll just go run” runs that I ever did.
With art it is the same. I began to have to ask myself the question, if I have only 1 hour a day or less, what do I do? How do I maintain the skills I’ve built for my whole life? How do I expand those skills?
For me, one high-impact way of retaining drawing skills is drawing a photo with Sharpie. Let’s go over what it means to draw in ink, and Sharpie specifically:
No takebacks, everything is permanent so everything matters
Are you an artist who draws on a tablet and on paper? Have you ever been drawing on paper and your brain tries to press CTRL-Z? Or maybe your brain tries to access the Procreate double-tap to undo a previous action? I ask because, I’ve done this what feels like thousands of times. What I try to do is draw on paper with Sharpie until my brain stops doing that.
Only one color. No real shading.
Thinking will happen in terms of shapes and line and negative space. There are only three main values to using a single Sharpie color: Paper, Sharpie, and Sharpie Pressed Hard.
Only one size of pen.
No outrageously broad strokes, no hair-thin lines without using the hand to either change the pen angle or pressure.
What’s the point of doing all this if I can get back on my computer in an hour and use my wacom tablet? The point is that ultimately when I do get back on the computer, I can use my time better because I am faster and more accurate at art.
I’ve been making art my whole life - I painted as a toddler and I finished an art major. I have my art for sale online and in galleries. Of all my experiences in art, what I find myself going back to when I draw like this is the negative space training I did in a high school art class. We learned from the book “Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain.” Where some left/right brain studies have been debunked, the principles of this book and it’s focus on negative space has served me well time and time again.
It might be that Sharpie drawing is incredibly frustrating at first, which is good, because every high-impact learning environment is going to be extremely frustrating. For me, it can often be a way of making a series of mistakes and rescuing the situation at the last minute.
When I look at all the mistakes I make in a drawing, I do think of the Bob Ross maxim of “Happy Little Accidents.” Maybe the biggest skill in art is patience and some dogged ability to keep working and have faith that everything will turn out okay in the end. Everything looks kind of bad or flubbed, until it suddenly looks good. Everything looks impossible until someone actually does it. The funny thing about limits is that they expand us, and eventually absolute limits get absolutely transcended.