#195 - Why You Should Also Write
A weekly writing habit that is beneficial to visual artists.
Don't know what to draw? Try my art flashcards!
ou don’t write because you want to say something; you write to find out what you want to say. If you ever find yourself in a teaching position, you will notice that you understand a topic better after you explain it to someone. It also forces you to find the right words to explain it to yourself.
We’re artists. You are probably reading this because you like to draw. But it can also be helpful to write and reflect on what you are doing.
A good habit is to sit once a week, maybe during the weekend, and to reflect on your plans for last week, what you did, how it went, and how to process that and come up with plans for the coming week, using what you learned. What worked, and what didn’t? What do you want to keep doing? What needs to change?
I like keeping such documents digital, but you can also dedicate a small booklet to it, writing in it every Saturday or so and making creative plans for the coming week.
This Week
As mentioned in the above short article, I write to work through things I struggle with on Practice Drawing This. The This Week section has become the public version of that.This week, I was drawing more and devising a plan to revive my YouTube channel. You can see two images here.
I now draw on large A2-sized sheets and take photos in an aspect ratio of 17x6. I read somewhere that some old mid-frame cameras used that, and I like how it looks in my newsletter. I can also convert these into carousels.
I accidentally discovered that if I turn the mobile’s screen really bright and take a photo of the page in indirect sunlight, I can change the levels so that the camera screen pops out.
I made a new 3D model , slightly altered from the previous one. It’s based on the 3D arrow presented in a recent drawing exercise over at the Proko Perspective Course. I also made a very short timelapse video of me drawing this arrow .
Also, I workshopped the first iterations of a new class of 3D models based on blobs with someone on our Discord.
Further discussions on our Discord led to adding isolines, and rendering shadows, and including models where you see a floor. 
We have more plans for organic models based on blobs.
I like the This Week section. It can be about something true this week and not true next week, something I am struggling with this week, or something I am working on right now.
I filmed myself filling out the A2 sheets shown above. I plan to share them in my YouTube videos to show how cool the art flashcards app is. I use it myself, but I have to admit that I don’t use it as often as I want because I am distracted by things to do to promote it.
I sometimes wonder why I promote it. I don’t make money off it. I could spend time in my sketchbook instead.
The current plan, this week’s plan, is to voice record articles like the one you are reading right now so that you can listen to them as podcasts. Next week’s article will have an audio version.
I can use the audio as a voice-over when showing me drawing using the art flashcards.
When I heard AI voices and how good they already are, I contemplated using them for a micro-second, a nanosecond, or even a femtosecond. But here’s the thing: as good as they are, you eventually feel that there is no human behind them. By using that, I’d lose something. It wouldn’t feel like “me,” and you would feel like you were listening to a robot. Which you would be.
I do understand the temptation to use AI. As a novice (and when it comes to voice acting, I am a novice), it is very tempting to use something that sounds or looks “good enough.”
But it isn’t “good enough.” It isn’t even the same thing. Listening to a robot voice is not the same as listening to my voice, warts and all. You get a sense of the person behind this. That’s not so if you listen to a robot voice which removes the human element.
This will be my voice. I will have to learn about voice acting and reading.
More Photos Coming
The other day, there was a flea market nearby. They say it is the largest one in Europe. And I believe them. It’s huge.
Lots of very cool people go there, dressed wonderfully original. Many of my flashcards are from previous visits to this same flea market in past years.
Expect the flashcards to be expanded upon with more of these. I also want to focus more on architecture flashcards as that category section is still empty.
I share the two images below to show one important thing I try to do: The left image comes from the camera. You see that there is high contrast, especially in the shadows, which is great for “Art” photography as it adds drama and creates beautiful shapes, but for photo reference for drawing, I find it useful to lower contrast, especially in the darker areas so that you see the forms better. Incidentally, this is also how past masters rendered; they’d render cast shadows less dark to suggest form through hatching. Nowadays, art is often more about beautiful shapes. The one on the right is what the flashcard will look like. I’ve also taken to erasing faces for privacy reasons.
Look at all that information that is hidden in the dark shadows! It is the same photo! The camera actually captures all that information that is useful to us artists, and then makes it all black!
I do this with the 3D models , too: I light them so that they are never too dark, so you can always see the details we need to draw.
I still have many photos I took that I need to add to the art flashcards and also many Marcus Ranum stock images. In addition, I found a new stock image resource that I think I am allowed to use for the flashcards , so I am looking into that, too.
A funny thing about Practice Drawing This is that it is forcing me to become better at other things, like photography and voice acting in this case. This is a good thing, it keeps my brain growing. But it might also be distracting me from drawing.
Making time to draw more.
And as it happens, that is the topic of this week’s YouTube video which premieres this Saturday and plays from 4PM CET.
This week, someone shared this documentary about François Boucq on our Discord which fits in with the theme of making time to draw: in the video, he drew from 8:30 until 21:30 straight without breaks, stopping for nothing as people called him to try to distract him.
There is a similar video about a day in the life of the comics artist Frank Quitely where he also just draws all day, without break, from early in the morning until late at night. Talk about making time to draw.
These videos make their lives look really cool, though. They draw all day in these beautiful spaces.