Wednesday, July 25, 2012

Sketching, Thinking, Imagining

I used to hate to sketch. I can't say I love it now ( the act of applying paint is much more satisfying), but  I know the value it has, and I love the outcome.  I never sketched when I started painting; something in doing the same image twice didn't feel right. Then, in university, one of my teachers forced us into a thumbnail sketching exercise, from which I was able to use 2 or 3 images to paint some of my best works.

For some reason, I came back to my bad habit of not sketching before starting a painting. Today, I went to the studio and started on finishing a painting which I hadn't thought through. It is extremely dull at this point. I realized I was wasting my time and my paint. I didn't know where I was going, and even though that's sometimes a blessing in a creative process, too much in my case leads to an epic search for THE thing that will make the picture work.  Nothing I did worked out for this dull painting.

After an hour, I decided to put everything away.  I sat down at my new work desk ( which I found in the hallway of my building; some other studio was giving it away), and started on sketching thumbnails. It's the only solution I could come up with. My head was messy and so was my painting.


All these ideas came out of my head, into little scribbles. I browsed my family pictures at hand, and colored really elementary reproductions. I never spend more than 5 minutes on a sketch. To me, it's a sketch, not the work; I also need to place the colors and define composition more than decide exactly how the picture will look at the end. And the great thing about sketches is you don't care what they look like at the end, so you can draw over them as much as you want.

I was aligning my thought into a weird mind map, chaotic but organised, into these little images. I remembered some concepts I'd forgotten, motifs I don't use anymore, symbols and patterns I put aside. I realized I had ticks I had to get rid of, for the sake of originality.

 I decided to go back to the thumbnails.Yeah, this 2 hours of sketching was an amazing experience. I'm adding it to my weekly to do list.

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