As an Illustrator and designer by trade, I have been helping a friend's daughter by tutoring her in fine art. She has been having alot of trouble in her life drawing class (sketching live models or still life i.e.: fruit, bottles platters etc.) So last week, we started by working on a simple apple. I placed the apple in front of her and asked her to draw what she saw which came out like a circle with a hump at the top and a leaf sticking off a stem. She spent the most of her time shading with colours, trying to compensate the poor replication of the apple by hiding it behind tones and colours which in the end became overkill. Upset, she scrunched up her face..."that looks nothing like it, she said. I told her that her problem was she was looking at an apple and trying to draw an apple. What she had to do was look at the "Shape" of the apple...break it down to simple curves, and the distance between each curve, then replicate what she sees, translating it to the paper. But before that, she had to go even more basic then that, first to draw a single line that found the angle of the apple, then some foundation lines that gave us basic chape, then look for the curves She tried again, and after a handful of tries, and though the perspective was out and the apple looked a bit skewed...she had managed to find all the apples curves and structure...It's identity so to speak. There was no shading, for I didn't let her waste time on that just yet. But each time she looked at the apple she saw it in a different light. On the last try for the day, she looked up at what she had done and said "I can't believe I got it!" "Well you haven't got it yet, I told her, but you're well on your way. The next time we sat down I put a a pear in front of her. She did a very impressive first try, but she head drawn that first single line, the one that picks her angle, out so I knew it was going to come off looking skewed... Half way she stopped. I asked her what's wrong. She said "I got my angle wrong." I told her I was happy she'd seen it for herself. She shook her head. "Just when I thought I'd got it, I realise there's is more I have to fine tune." And so last night as I trained in class, it occurred to me how much learning to draw was like learning a martial art, or in this case - taijutsu. When I started doing this art, I recall how everything felt wrong to me...having learnt rigid systems in the past, I was struggling back then to do what I saw the others doing. This concept of manipulating your opponents space and momentum as apposed to just deflecting the attacks seemed very strange and I was like a clumsy newborn child at first. I was "seeing a martial art" and just trying to replicate exactly as I saw. Slowly I realised that I had to look at the structure of what I was doing and I recall the times in my training where I thought I had finally understood a technique only to realise many days/ weeks/ months later, that while I had grasped the main element, I had still quite alot of fine tuning to do. Last night, executing gensekki is what made me think about this...when I first started taijutsu...just understanding the mechanics of the technique was daunting...which way does my arm move? Do I use force or momentum etc etc...then slowly I understood the mechanics and found all the things I did wrong...foot work, etc but yesterday I found myself scolding myself for so much, (hips too high, hips too low, where the points of contact were etc... it's amazing how much the understanding evolves and how sometimes I feel I will never truly understand it...he he...but I say that in a good way. Has anyone else ever felt this way? (I long winded post for a very simple question I guess, but I couldn't think of a better way to ask it.) Cheers Nick
I think we all feel that way most of the time. In fact i think we need to feel this way to progress. Unlike a drawing or painting that may be declared done, finished, ended ,we need to blank our canvas out every day and redraw our drawing every lesson , no matter how good the drawing from the day before was or was not .
