Draw What You See (And Other Confusing Suggestions)

i used to attend college, back when i was fresh out of high school. i remember enjoying the art classes moderately; they were hours-long, but allowed me to do what i was doing in marginalia up to that point: doodling, drawing, and really stretching my artistic legs for the first time.

these were classes billed as "art 101" and similar: baseline examples of observing and creating art. i am extremely thankful that i had self-taught for at least five years before entering college-level art classes. otherwise, i think i would have missed out on some things that were not taught well in the classes i took.

i think this is easily exemplified in a memory of a class i had where we were told to go outside to observe and draw clouds. everyone was pretty confused. how does one "draw a cloud"? she smiled and said, "figure it out."

on one hand, i think this approach could be considered pretty novel and allows artists to experiment and "figure out" what works for them. but i also very firmly believe that the majority of students were missing a greater context of foundational techniques for marking form and value - they may not have known of many avenues open to them. and, of course, there are a lot of ways you can go from the starting line here. i imagine a significant amount of my peers found themselves paralyzed by choice - myself included!

you can start with the sky, and use an eraser to detail the clouds from light pencil rubbings. you could use light, loose spirals to build volume. you could use broad strokes or fine strokes or smudges or eraser-marks.... and so on!

again: if there was any idea of where you could go, i would be a lot less annoyed by how this was implemented. i can understand the hesitancy of giving students an intended path to finishing the assignment, but i think the fact that this was being graded - nebulously, no defined metric aside from what the professor could glean from your efforts - made this a lot more stressful than it needed to be.

another class from this same professor that i took, which focused on figure drawing, helped me understand form in new ways, but i feel she lacked some vocabulary to convey what she wanted to see from us. something she told us to do was to "feel out the form", and demonstrated her use of the coil method, a technique where you use 'coil' shapes to define form before outlining. although the linked video is intended for foreshortening, it's also more widely applicable for drawing in general.

i am a huge proponent of the coil method, personally. it helps you visualize something 3d on a 2d plane. it's like building up a clay sculpture, circling the form... it's just really genius. but i think her execution here was lacking.

bringing us back a ways, in high school, i recall asking an art teacher how to draw humans. i think she wanted to give me a 'draw the rest of the fucking owl' lesson, but my intent was - and i really fumbled it here, since i lacked the vocabulary for it - to understand one or two ways people generally start plotting the form, the shape, the general idea.

i think there's a recurring theme here: a student doesn't want to be handed a single answer, and the teacher does not want to give a single answer, but they don't have that mutual understanding of "i want to figure it out, but i need guidance". and i think that is a huge roadblock!

to return to the cloud example: this would have been more effective if she had, at the time, taught us the viable methods for defining form and helped us understand each method we could potentially try - without calling them THE Single Method To Use.

more widely, i think it's worth keeping this sentiment in mind in personal art, too. there's no good single way to draw something. there's a billion approaches. you might know only one or two ways, and that might feel stifling. so you should always seek a new one if you feel yourself slowing down, if not just for the novelty of the thing.

i just hope more artists can find their foundations and explore with reasonable understanding of their options.