Tien Chiu

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Planning vs. playing

Here, for the curious, is the result of yesterday’s plane flight:

Exploring watercolor pencil techniques
Exploring watercolor pencil techniques

And here is this morning’s doodle:

a rainbow tree!
a rainbow tree!

Drawing, particularly in color, is a dicey thing for me.  Because it’s an unfamiliar medium, I don’t have a lot of skills to draw on, and am thus acutely self-conscious about starting a piece, because I “know” it’s not going to be good.  (See prior blog post on the gap between excellent taste and nascent skills.)  As a result, I tend to go blank when confronted with a sheet of paper.  In fact, I wasn’t entirely certain the pencils wouldn’t explode if I (a novice) actually touched them to the paper.

This, of course, gave birth to the first page of doodles.  My first approach to something new is to conduct a series of systematic experiments, dissecting it and trying to understand how it is structured, how it works, and how to design it.  So, to overcome the terror of total blankness, I did a small doodle, then repeated it in different variations – wet pencils vs. dry pencils, wetting the paper after applying the pencils, wetting the paper and then applying pencils.  For good measure, I repeated the experiment using the second set of pencils.

After establishing that the pencils did not explode (hooray!) , I proceeded to read through my book on watercolor pencils.  Then I turned back to the pad of paper.  Zounds!  Was that another blank sheet of paper?  I tried thinking of something to sketch and drew a total blank.  I hastily put the pad and pencils away, hiding them in my carry-on, and read a book for the rest of the flight.

This morning I got up and decided to try again.  I had convinced myself earlier that morning that my inability to draw representational art didn’t have to be a barrier; after all, one rarely sees elaborate drawings of peacocks and elephants on handwoven garments.  I could do abstract stuff instead, which would be more appropriate to what I was doing anyway.

So I started with a ribbon of red pencil, then a ribbon of orange, then a ribbon of yellow.  Somewhere along the lines I realized that they resembled the trunk of a tree, so I added a scribble of green foliage and a few scribbles of color in blues, purples, and reds.  It didn’t come out as dark as I wanted, so I wetted down the paper, and (remembering the results of yesterday’s experiments) redrew the foliage on wet paper, giving much more intense colors.

And there you have it!  One doodle, a psychedelic tree.  I like it, though it looks like a child’s scrawl.  To me the important part is that I did it – and enjoyed doing it – which is, of course, ninety percent of the battle.

So why is this blog post titled “Planning vs. playing”?  Because my watercolor pencil process  illustrates something vital: the importance of playing around, especially when taking up a new art/craft.  As adults, we tend to get very goal-focused, feeling somewhat self-conscious about “just playing around”, but as I wrote in this essay, playing is essential, since at the outset, your skills aren’t likely to be up to your ambitions.  So I’m deliberately turning off the planning section of my brain and “working on” just enjoying the process.

Mind you, developing skills is important – and I’ll probably do some drawing exercises later today – but for now, I’m trying to let go of the (overdeveloped) planning sections of my brain, and just enjoy doodling.

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Training and retraining

I decided that if I was going to try using Adobe Illustrator for fashion design, I had better learn a bit about Illustrator first!  So I took some time off from finishing Kodachrome and spent 2-3 hours with Illustrator instead.  It was fun! and I’m planning to continue studying via online tutorials.

Here is what I produced using one of the great tutorials from n-design:

Pumpkin!
Pumpkin, courtesy of Adobe Illustrator

I actually started out with this great beginner’s tutorial, targeted at Photoshop users who want to learn Illustrator.  It’s short but it taught me how to do the very basics, which prepared me for the pumpkin tutorial.  I’m still not at the point of doing really complex work yet, but the pumpkin looks nice, no?

In addition to learning Illustrator, I’ve also been practicing on the loom.  After playing with things a bit, I’ve concluded that despite my modifications the CompuDobby IV will not keep up with my lightning-fast shed changes.  So I need to slow down my treadling.

Does that mean slowing down my weaving?  Possibly, BUT! I think that by changing the order in which I do things, I can get a slower treadling pace without appreciably slowing down my weaving speed.  Currently I change sheds, throw the shuttle, beat while closing the shed, and then open the shed at the same instant that I start moving the beater back.  I believe that if I can adjust the motion so that I open the shed a trifle after I start moving the beater back, I can get the time the Compudobby needs without compromising weaving speed.

This is, of course, easier said than done.  The motions of weaving have become so automatic that changing the rhythm is very, very difficult – it’s like trying to change the way you swing your arms while you’re walking.  Not only is it difficult to learn the new rhythm, I keep finding myself lapsing into the old method.  But I am persevering.  I have decided to weave in 20-30 minute sessions, 2-3 sessions per day, and quit as soon as I start having trouble keeping the new rhythms.  Regular practice will help ingrain it into muscle memory.

I haven’t been able to weave fast enough using this method (because it feels awkward and clumsy still) to test out my theory, but hope to get there in a couple more days.  Meanwhile, I am weaving yards and yards of a 2/2 twill, which (while boring) will give me some base fabric to use for my dye experiments.  This fabric is 20/2 white tencel warp woven with white alpaca weft of about the same size – which produces such a beautiful, fine fabric that it seems a shame to cut it up for dye samples.  If I figure out what I’m doing before the end of the warp, I think I will use it for weaving a shawl or two.

(The alpaca is actually so beautiful that I wouldn’t use it at all, except for the finances of the equation.  It is much cheaper for me to use a fine-quality alpaca than a mid-range wool…because I get my yarns at wholesale prices from a mill-end supplier of luxury yarns, yarns like alpaca and mohair actually costs much less than a wool yarn at retail.  The downside is that his stock changes regularly, so I have to pounce on white yarns when he has them!)

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Free hand vs. control grip

I’m back to drawing!

I’ve switched over from Nicolaides’ The Natural Way to Draw to Keys to Drawing by Bert Dodson, primarily because Nicolaides’ book requires a live model for many of the exercises, and I haven’t got one.  However, I’m coming back to a lot of the exercises in The Natural Way to Draw because I’m finding them extremely useful.

Anyway, today’s exercise in Keys to Drawing is about the free hand and the control hand, which I thought was a useful metaphor for life in general.  When drawing with the free hand, you hold the pencil loosely, with the grip relatively far away from the tip, and draw quickly, using your arm rather than the small muscles of the hand, to sketch out the outline of what you’re drawing.  When drawing with the control grip, you move closer to the tip of the pencil, grasp it firmly, and consolidate, finalizing the details.

I am not naturally a free hand sort of person.  I tend to be methodical rather than spontaneous, systematic instead of fluid.  I had never really considered my style before taking the design class – but seeing the work of my fellow students has made me realize that other, very different, styles exist.  I tend to be explicitly narrative in my work (where narrative is possible), packing in symbolism and meaning; I’m uncomfortable with abstraction, because no explicit narrative is present.  (That may be partly cultural; see this very interesting (and enjoyable!) essay on abstract vs. symbolic in American culture, Why Americans Don’t Like Jazz).  I also tend to cram in lots of details.

In contrast, my fellow students run the gamut from bold strokes to subtle shadings.  They seem to be much more comfortable with abstract shapes than I am, and OK with distorted representations of real objects.  Where I agonize over the fact that I can’t draw a realistic person, they don’t want to draw a real person – instead they use a crude representation to abstract out all the details and leave only the things they want to show.  It’s not that their art is better than mine, but it’s different.  And the difference has me wondering.

So, as I was drawing a stargazer lily this morning, and getting frustrated because the results of my free hand drawing were misproportioned to the point where consolidation with the control grip was simply not possible, I had a flash of insight.  Since I wasn’t having fun with the control grip, why not switch to just doing the free hand?  So I did a series of gesture drawings and free-hand sketches of the lilies, and found that to be a lot more enjoyable.  While the results didn’t exactly mimic the lily, they were pleasing to the eye and looked recognizably like a lily.  They were free-form, rather than literal.  This was fun!

So I’ve decided that, in drawing, rather than focusing on systematically developing skills, I’m going to focus on what is fun.  I’ll still follow the lesson plan – sort of – but loosely, switching between exercises as I find stuff that I enjoy.  I’m also going to let go of the idea that the drawing’s success depends on how realistic it is.  Eureka! It doesn’t.  An abstract, looser style is also fine.

So I think I have learned something important from design class, though it may not be exactly about design.

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Drawing progress

I bet you were wondering, amidst all this philosophizing and weaving, whether I was actually doing any drawing.  The answer is yes, I’m devoting about an hour a day to practicing.  I just haven’t posted any photos because gesture drawings and contour drawings aren’t really intended as drawings; they’re exercises, and not all that visually interesting.  It would be like recording and posting someone playing finger exercises on the violin.

However, today at lunchtime, while taking a break from contour and gesture drawings, I drew a pencil sharpener that didn’t turn out too badly:

sketch of a glass pencil sharpener
sketch of a glass pencil sharpener

It’s not Art, but the proportions aren’t too far off, and it’s recognizably similar to the subject.  That’s all I’m asking for, for now.

One thing that has really struck me in Art and Fear is this passage:

The ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups.  All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality.  His procedure was simple: on the final day of class he would bring in his bathroom scales and weigh the work of the “quantity” group: fifty pounds of pots rated an “A”, forty pounds a “B”, and so on.  Those being graded on “quality”, however, needed to produce only one pot – albeit a perfect one – to get an “A”.  Well, came grading time and a curious fact emerged: the works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity.  It seems that while the “quantity” group was busily churning out piles of work – and learning from their mistakes – the “quality” group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay.

So for drawing, I’m not limiting myself to the exercises in The Natural Way to Draw; instead, I’m reading through Keys to Drawing and doing those exercises as well, and – beyond that – practicing drawing in any free moments.  It’s like a friend said about writing – you learn to write well by writing a couple thousand pages of bad writing first.  The first thousand pages are guaranteed to be bad.  So write them as fast as you can, working on improving them as you do; the only way to good writing lies through all those pages of terrible, awful writing.

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Transitions and butterflies!

The dust is still settling in my creative life, as I shift my focus from the now-completed dye study group to other things.  Transitions are always tricky, and I don’t feel that I’ve found my creative balance/focus yet.  But things are rapidly starting to settle into place: an hour of drawing on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday mornings; design class on Tuesday and Thursday mornings; and a three-hour drawing session with a live model on Saturday mornings.  The rest of the routine is not yet determined, but it will probably involve weaving in the evenings and on weekends, and possibly a little bit of painting (acrylics or watercolor), or else surface design using Shiva Paintstiks on fabric.  I have some ideas that I think would be fun to try!

But it seems fairly clear that the next 3-6 months of my creative life will be spent focusing on fine arts – composition, drawing, and painting.  I’m determined to plunge in and develop the skills I’ve wanted (and needed!) for 20+ years, so I can add them to my collection of creative tools.  I think that will make a big difference.

I don’t know how other artists handle transitions.  For me, there is usually a period of emptiness after a big project – my Muse usually goes on vacation for a week or two – followed by about a month of trying, in rapid succession, anything and everything I can get my hands on.   Eventually everything settles out, the crafts that didn’t make the “cut” get put back into storage, and I continue on with one or two major projects/focuses.  Life is fairly settled for another six months, and then I finish a project and the whole process starts again.  It’s helpful for me to know that rhythm, so I can work with the transitions and not against them.

I have a minor project in mind, though.  Actually two of them.  The first is the peacock feather shawl, which I am still debating whether I want to weave.  I don’t feel my vision for the shawl is as strong as I would like, so I’m not sure I want to continue with it, especially since weaving it will be so time-consuming.  I haven’t decided against doing it, either, because I have some ideas for the lining of the shawl that I think would be interesting to play with.

The second is a shawl of butterflies!  I have at this point loaded several butterfly patterns from a cross-stitch program into Photoshop, and will weave some of those to see how they come out.  If I like the way the designs come out, I’m going to grab photos of butterflies off the web and redraw them in Photoshop so I can get recognizable species of butterflies in the shawl.  With just 3-4 base body types, I can vary the colors to produce a shawl that doesn’t repeat any butterflies along the entire length of the shawl!  And the lining on the back of the shawl can be decorated using surface design techniques (butterfly stamps and Paintstiks), and then beaded very, very lightly – just enough to disguise the places where the lining is tacked to the shawl.

This idea attracts me more than the peacock feather shawl, which I think still needs some developing, so I may well pass from peacock feathers to butterflies and work on that idea instead.

One more progress milestone – this morning I drew a bottle of Cointreau.  It still doesn’t look that much like the bottle, but I’m not running screaming from it, either.  I think I’ve made it through the beginner’s panic.  Hooray!