You guys don't understand how big of an achievement that is for me. When I first started school as an art student I barely could get myself to draw in my sketchbook once a month, much less every day. These past five years have been more of a lesson in discipline than anything else. I learned that I could keep feeling guilty that I wasn't doing what I knew I should be, or I could buckle down and actually do it. I realized it was a lot less painless to just draw, and I actually realized that keeping a sketchbook on me almost all the time is the best way to capture the ideas I was missing before. And I have grown to love my sketchbooks, they are all very precious to me.
You know that question of what would you grab if your house was burning and you could only grab one thing? Without hesitation it would be my sketchbooks.
The drawings in them are sometimes ok, but mostly bad. But that doesn't matter, because they are a record of my life, I can look in my sketchbooks and remember moments. Where I was, if I was eating, who I was with, how I felt. It's all recorded in those falling a part bundles of paper.
But I digress. This year's Inktober is a witness to how far I have come, from never thinking of drawing to being infinitely excited to get started.
So I have decided to share these drawings with you. They are all not great, some are better than others, but I still have far to go. But they represent an landmark in my life. So they are important.
The Theme: So for my prompt each day, I decided to focus on human faces. I did it less because I wanted to get better at drawing them, and more because I wanted to get over drawing them. Let me explain - I draw faces too much. I reasoned that if I drew them everyday for a month, not only would I get better, but I would also get tired of drawing only faces. I feel that drawing just human faces all the time, I have become frozen in my ability to draw pretty much everything else. I know this about myself: that when I repeatedly do the same thing too much, I get tired of it and lose interest. My life needs so much balance in all things to stay engaged. So I felt that by drawing faces everyday, I would lose the overwhelming desire to just draw faces and move on to improving in other areas.
And at the conclusion, I can honestly say that when I think of what to draw, my mind does not automatically shift to a face. So I guess my method worked.
So peruse them at your leisure. Inspiration came from all sorts of places - books I read, images from Pinterest, movies I like, master artists I admire, people around me, even my dreams. Which is your favorite?
P.S. sorry about not being able to look at them much larger - I hate formatting on here. It was driving me insane and so I gave up and used Photoshop. But you can definitely see larger images on my Instagram - @ambermstotts
They are all on there, just backwards in order.
Happy November! On to a new month with new art!
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