Dead Ends In Art Are Necessary In The Creative Process, Otherwise You Are Not Doing Anything New
Practice Drawing Female Head En Profile, After Heinrich Kley
hen I discovered Kim Jing Gi, I went down the rabbit hole of reading his interviews to learn how he had trained. I discovered the drawing-from-memory exercise, and it changed how I practice drawing.
hen I discovered Kim Jing Gi, I went down the rabbit hole of reading his interviews to learn how he had trained. I discovered the drawing-from-memory exercise, and it changed how I practice drawing. Drawing from memory makes you better at visualizing what you want to draw and sensing when and what is off in a drawing. And it’s fun.
Later, I stumbled onto the concept of the memory athlete: someone competing to memorize as many decks of cards (!) as possible. I went down that rabbit hole thinking I could learn things to help me draw from memory.
I learned new things about how our brains work but could not see how it would benefit my art practice. I could not figure out how to use a “Memory Palace” to memorize a visual any better than how I was already doing it by visualizing it.
Sometimes, we end up at dead ends when trying new things, which is okay. The alternative is to avoid trying new things, not to grow, to stagnate.
This Week
I found a list of beautiful public-domain statues on SketchFab and decided to incorporate them into the website. Some are high-poly count; they didn’t look great in wireframe mode, so I created a render mode with a shiny-metal surface. 24 such statue objects were added:
I made minor changes so the randomized rotations of the statue models are always reasonable, always (hopefully) an interesting viewpoint. It was an interesting exercise! These sculptures are designed to look good under specific angles. Some, like the heads, you want to see mostly the front up to the profile, but for others, like the models designed for artist reference (there are two anatomy models there where you see the muscles!), you want to see them from any angle. Contrary to primitive forms, they have a clear up-and-down, and that should be respected when rotating them randomly; otherwise, you don’t know what you’re looking at.
I made lots of other minor improvements. When choosing an image for a value study, line art reference images are now excluded. And I cleaned up the website’s landing page: At the top, clear cards are showing four important sections (3D Models, Timed Drawing, the Morning Sketches APP, Discord) and a “New? Start Here” card. Less text, more images.
Someone mentioned that the previous logo was hard to discern on Discord, so the website now has a new logo. It is also the pen point of the wordmark version of the logo:
It’s a stylized version of a 3D cone, hinting at the 3D models on the website. It also looks like a swirly line drawn with that dot, hinting at a pen drawing. It looks like the letter A, which is the first letter of my name. And it seems like the tip of a pen or pencil, which means it also fits at the end of the wordmark version of the logo which has the shape of a pencil, and as a bonus, in the wordmark version, the point is turned ninety degrees and the dot in the ellipse looks like an eye, suggesting observation, which is essential to drawing.
It’s cool to have all of that in a squiggly line with a dot.
The logo remains surprisingly readable when scaled down, which makes it suitable for website favicons, which have to be as small as 16 by 16 pixels. It’s pure black and white, which means it should look good in print in any form. And it’s even easier to draw the logo by hand with some practice, so I can easily add it to website-related drawings.
Yours sincerely,
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