musings on drawing, on mastery, on confidence

Drawing is hard for me. It doesn't come naturally. I struggle with spacial awareness, and that makes it hard to translate things that I see with my eyes into lines on a page. 

Historically I've worked around this by image searching for "thing I want to draw + line drawing", and when I found one I liked, I'd print it off and trace it and then make it more my own before carving and printing it. 

The problem I started having was that I had clear ideas in my head of what I wanted to create, but wasn't finding good line drawing images of those things. After enough annoyance with this, I finally started tracing over photographs instead of line drawings, because it's so much easier to find photographs than line drawings of things. It took a while for me to try this, because I was certain that it was going to be too hard and I'd just get annoyed and frustrated and feel bad about myself. But then the frustration and annoyance of not being able to create what I wanted became greater, so I went for it. And it turns out that having spent the last year or so doing lots of art stuff, I'm better at doing it than I realized! Instead of feeling frustrated and bad about my skills, I felt like I had super powers. 

I wanted to make some goofy Canada geese. I found 3 photos of geese, and then traced them to create my own drawings of geese.

goose photo I printed

geese I drew/traced from photos

carved goose

It still feels disingenuous for me to say "I drew these geese", because to me, "drawing" means I took a piece of paper and a pencil and I made these lines happen organically from within my own brain. I put a thin piece of paper over a photo of a thing, and traced the general shapes and lines, is that drawing? I'm not trying to be self-deprecating, I'm trying to be precise with my language. I suppose the nuanced answer is that I've found ways to make drawing accessible to me, and the ways I draw might or might not meet someone else's criteria for what counts as 'drawing', but it's still the most accurate word I have.

It is kinda thrilling to see myself get better at this thing. To look at drawings I drew and feel happy with the outcome. That's newish for me. It's nice to let myself have that, the warm fuzzy feeling that comes with recognizing that I've gotten better at a thing that I care very much about.