I had an art tutor called Deb – “oh its fabulous darling”, she was a very elegant, artsy, and fabulous woman. In fact, she encouraged me to take my photography further.
She was an illustrator by trade, a fabulous illustrator. I think you may be building up a picture of Deb now. Anyway, she was well versed and experienced in the field of the arts. She would believe in her students and push them where was needed. I very much admired her and always enjoyed my lessons with her.
As an artist (and I use that term extremely liberally for myself), actually scratch that, as a student of art I was always drawing inside the lines literally and figuratively speaking. Art to me at that time was a linier process and something that I tried to understand by quantifying it. Completely the wrong approach but I hadn’t learnt that lesson back then. I tried to be very precise with the work I was producing, and I didn’t want to do anything ‘wrong’. It was almost like I was afraid of making any kind of creative mess. Only now I understand that the creative process hides in that mess.
I was very happy to draw using a HB pencil with not quite a fine pint but pretty sharp. For those of you that draw, you know the type of line that will leave on some nice cartridge paper. I was confined by the desire to draw something that was perfect but could never achieve it. I’m not saying that to be modest, my drawings were bad!
One day I was in a class where we were doing a drawing exercise and copying some illustrations. I think mine was some kind of goblin type creature. I took out my HB and started to gingerly draw this messy-looking creature on my larger drawing pad. Deb (“fabulous darling”) walked past and watched me sketching for a moment, She told me to stop and give her my pencil and eraser. She handed me back a thick, smudgy, and dull graphite stick and told me to carry on with that instead, and then walked off.
I started to draw some lines and moved my hand, smudging graphite over what was a pristine paper. As you can imagine it made a mess and internally, I started to panic. The more I drew the messier it got and then I started making mistakes, lines going wrong in thick graphite and they were extremely obvious. I panicked more, I couldn’t erase them, I had to embrace the mess and chaos on my paper and just carry-on drawing. The more I drew the messier it got but then a character started to appear. It all started to come together, even the mistakes gave the drawing personality. I even started working with the mistakes as I drew more and didn’t care for the misdrawn lines. By the end I was liberated and couldn’t believe that out of that mess arose the best drawing I have ever produced. It really was amazing; you will have to believe me on this.
“Fabulous darling, I knew you could do it”
