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Later, around six or seven years, as you matured,
and your perception of the world expanded and became
more complex, you tried to be more realistic in your
drawings. Rather than just drawing two dots and a curved
line that represented two eyes and a mouth, you began to
attempt to depict your subject in a more realistic way.
The eye became a compound object with a pupil (a dot),
the iris (a circle surrounding the dot), and the eyeball
(a circle enclosing the smaller circle). And the mouth
may have been drawn smiling as a crescent shape with a
grid inside it representing teeth. And now, a nose is
added that is a bulb with two dots for nostrils. These
became your own personal "symbols" of what an eye, nose,
and mouth looked like. In order to create likeness in a
drawing of your family, you always drew the same faces
but added long hair for Mom and Sister, and drew short
hair for Dad. You may have even drawn Mom and Dad
physically larger than you and Sister. In the same way
you drew people, you drew objects; A chair was two very
flat ovals with two lines sticking out the bottom, and a
window was a square with a cross drawn inside it to
represent window panes. These "symbols" that you drew
over and over again got stored in your logical mind as
what you would draw if asked to draw. Rather than draw
what your visual mind ACTUALLY sees, your logical mind
says "I see a chair - here's my symbol for a chair." and
you draw the chair you drew as a child.
Around sixth grade is when you decided that symbols just
aren't gonna cut it anymore. You'd try and draw what you
actually see, but your conditioned, logical mind, kicks
in and overrides your creative impulse and spits out yet
another symbol, or even better, a modified symbol that
does somewhat resemble the object you want to draw. Your
creative mind sees your symbol drawing and says "This
does NOT look like what I want! I can't draw, so I will
never draw again!" And so that was the end of your
learning. And from then on, when asked to draw, you
squirm and draw another symbol at the sixth grade level
of learning regardless of your age. Unfortunately, also
around the sixth grade, is when public schools stop
requiring art classes. Art now becomes an elective that
you don't have to take if you don't want to. The
children who do end up taking art classes are the ones
who are comfortable with drawing. These children may
have even stopped drawing "symbols" and started to
access the creative side of their brains and started
drawing what they see by breaking it down into lines and
shapes.
What we will try to do with this website is to get you
to use your visual mind and suppress your logical mind.
We are going to break your habit of drawing symbols and
allow your artistic, visual mind to draw what it
actually sees. Hopefully, you will be able to let go of
your sixth grade artistic mind and re-learn your art
skills. But this time, maturing in your skill without
giving up. These beginning exercises are meant to show
you how to suppress your symbol oriented mind and begin
to draw what you see and what you feel. |
