THIS Is What Kim Jung Gi Said!
If you do not listen to me, will you listen to him?I went online in search for information, and in interviews, Kim Jung Gi kept mentioning drawing from memory. I couldn’t understand the point of drawing from memory when you could also just draw from observation.
But then I just tried it, and after a week or two, I noticed that I had become much better at eye-balling!
To this day, memory drawing remains my Swiss army knife or practicing anything. It’s an intense mind-taxing exercise, so in the beginning you should only do one, and a simple one, but over time you get better at it and it gets easier and you can go on for longer.
I made a workbook on memory drawing , but it turns out to be a hard sell. People think it’s only about memorizing that one thing, and they don’t see the point of that.
Instead, drawing boxes is popular. This is also important to practice! In the YouTube video mentioned below, Kim Jung Gi considers that a no-brainer and then continues to harp on the benefits of drawing from memory.
I see many people who want to be able to draw like Kim Jung Gi, practicing drawing boxes online, but precious few are practicing memory drawing. Which is interesting, considering how important Kim Jung Gi thought it was. See the quotes below.
When it comes to the benefits of doing memory drawing exercises, don’t take my word for it, then.
Read what the great master Kim Jung Gi had to say about memory drawing. Below are short interview quotes, but I provide links to the full interviews. Read the original interviews in their entirety for the whole experience.
“I enjoy observing things everyday. I examine entire rooms when I enter and I collect a lot of visual resources. Gathering these resources and surfing the internet are two of my daily tasks. And I try to look at a lot of magazines, from all genres. I’ve saved these resources and look at them at least once a day to store them in my memory, as much as I can.”
The main difference between you and other artists is the ability to draw very complicated scenes from your memory, without the aid of any references or guidelines. How do you train your memory to keep alive all your visual vocabulary?
“I agree that there is a difference. I had always worked like that ever since I started drawing when I was a kid. I had developed my habit like so from the start. I had always thought that it was the right way. I’ve always drawn from memory; whether it was something I heard from people around me, or the animals I’ve seen from TV, or the scenes I saw from a movie. My drawings were always based on the things I saw or the things I heard, and it was only later that I found out that my method was different from other artists. Looking back, all the things I did for fun was actually a great training for me. I am still using that method, or course, but sometimes I do use reference materials when I need them. Having a good visual memory more than others also helped. I’ve always lived with a ‘If there is something I want to draw, I must draw it no matter when or where I am’ kind of mindset.”
Could you explain me your technique of drawing? I’ve heard people mentioning ‘Conscious Drawing’, what exactly is that?
“I work without reference, but it doesn’t mean I never look at them. I just don’t work “based” on pictures or don’t copy them. I observe references all the time and try to memorize them all. It’s nothing special, I have been used to it since I was a kid.”
Can you describe the daily routine of a professional illustration artist like you?
“My studio is located in my academy. I am a co-principal of this independent college preparatory academy for cartoon&animation major. I arrive at the studio by noon, turn on the computer and collect photographs for the visual resource. As I go through the collection of photographs I try to memorize all the important parts of the images. I work on this process on daily basis. After that I start working. I keep F1, soccer, or Moto GP game on while I’m working. I work usually 5~6 hours a day. I don’t stay up all night working since I’ve got married — maybe two or three times a month.”
Now that you’ve been teaching these online lectures, is there one thing that you would like for your students to remember and apply to their art, even if they forget all else?
“Yes. First of all, I believe the most fundamental thing, aside from working on your basics, which is a no-brainer, is knowing what it is that you want to draw. You have to be able to visualize what you’re trying to draw. Without that, you won’t be able to improve or advance in your skills. It’s just like the basics. If you don’t master the basics, you might take a few steps forward, but eventually you have to come back to work on them. Just like that, if you can’t visualize what you want to draw, it will be very difficult to be able to create spaciality, perspective, human bodies in your drawings. So practicing visualization, creating mentally what you want to draw, is key. Another problem might be that you’re able to visualize it, but can’t draw it. Even I can’t raw 100% of what I visuaize, I get maybe 70% or 80%. If I could reach 100%, I probably wouldn’t be here right now. I’d be working for NASA or something. I’d say I can draw many 60% or 70%, actually. I’m working on it still. But as you practice this, remember that the first step to reproducing what’s in your head on paper is having a solid visualization. You’ll need a lot of image training and observation to reach a point where you can think, “I’m going to draw this thing,” and immediately have an image in your head that you can work off of. Pay attention to everyday scenes that you might easily pass by, like that moment when you were crossing the street, the person that was on the other side, the nice car that was passing you. Be more attentive to any memorable moments from your mundane life, to the point where you can recall an image when you’re in bed thinking about them. My senses, visual, auditory, but mostly visual, are a lot more sensitive than the ordinary person. You know, I might think about that ramen place I went for lunch, what the server looked like, what she was wearing. You should also be able to revisit and visualize such scenes from your everyday life. ”
(I think with ’the basics’ he probably meant the fundamentals?)
Exercise 14: The Daily Composition
This is a memory drawing, to be done in scribbled gesture style, [...] you are to show the human being in relation to his environment.
Working in pencil, make a small drawing (about five by seven inches in size) of something you have seen during the past twenty-four hours. Put down as fast and easily as possible, and in any order, the various things you remember about a specific place and what was going on there. No more than fifteen minutes should be spent on one drawing. Make no corrections or alterations later, but go on to a new one the next day.
[...]
Since you never use the model for it, you may conveniently practice it during any spare quarter of an hour in your day. No other exercise in this book is more important than this one.
These compositions do not have to be right. They can all be wrong. THE IMPORTANT THING IS TO DO THEM. [...] The really serious student will make a quick composition every day for the rest of his life despite everything else he has to do.
Darren Rousar has an excellent book and a course on memory drawing .
There is also a free book by Horace Lecoq de Boisbaudran and translated by L. D. Luard about memory drawing, titled The Training of the Memory in Art and the Education of the Artist .
Another free book, by Marie Elisabeth Caveé, Drawing from memory : the Cavé method for learning to draw from memory .
Yours sincerely,
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