Drawing Inspiration

Work continues apace on learning how to do digital painting. I still haven't "solved" the finer points of Corel Painter, but I did have an inspiration on the drawing process. I've been doing things like drawing circles and heads. When I started doing circles, I remembered doing the same thing years ago but couldn't remember when. I've practiced drawing at other points in life, too. I'm not great at it, but I'm not the worst. In all that time I've always carefully watched what I was drawing trying to get it right. It seems logical to watch what you're doing. This week something inspirational happened.

There's a verse in the Hebrew Bible that says God knows the end from the beginning. While I was drawing one of the circles, I did something I'd never thought of doing before, and it wasn't a conscious decision. It was like a true inspiration. Instead of watching the circle form, I found myself looking at where the pen would end up, which was the beginning of the circle. That's exactly where the pen went. I discovered that I don't even have to look at what I'm drawing as long as I know where the end is. My hand automatically goes to where I'm looking. As far as circles go, I know the end from the very beginning of trying to draw it. It's almost trivially easy to draw a good circle. And I didn't have to draw 1,000 of them like I had already started doing.

I think I know how this works. I think it's a form of muscle memory. As humans, we touch hundreds of things per day. We have hundreds of practice sessions doing that. When I pick up a cup, I don't watch my hand. I look at the end point. I look where my hand is going, the cup. Sometimes, I don't even look at a cup. I just reach for it. And I do touches like this hundreds of times per day. For the sake of simple math, let's pretend I touch 100 things a day. Over the course of a year, that's 36,500 times I've practiced muscle memory for that action. Realistically, it's far more than 100. I wouldn't be surprised if we touch over 100,000 things per year. That's a lot of practice.

When I started looking at the end of the circle from the beginning of trying to draw it, I found that I could get the line to perfectly overlap the beginning of the circle. It's amazing. Straight lines aren't as easy, but I can get a far straighter line more consistently now. It's a very nice breakthrough and one that I've never seen taught. The art school way is to draw 1,000 circles being careful to deliberately try to improve with each one. When I do that, I think my muscles are making an untold number of adjustments trying to memorize every point of the circle. Looking at the end, I can do the circle in one motion just like I pick up a cup and get it right.

The especially sweet thing about learning how to draw a circle was that it took fewer than five minutes. I had what I thought was going to be almost an hour of time to practice with Painter. I ended up having to do laundry, etc. I had five minutes of time. I thought about skipping it but decided to go ahead. Five minutes is five minutes. I knew it wasn't enough time to get anything done, so I decided to practice circles instead. Sometimes, it's that last little bit of effort that pays off.

I'm not automatically a super drawer, but now I have a much easier and looser way of approaching it. I've already started using it Painter with painting with the stylus. I'm going to have to learn and adjust over time, but wow is it so much easier to approach now.

Have a great weekend.