Submission: first doodle ever

please save our village

This is by my wife Nikki, drawn in one of her makeup classes (she’s in school learning special-effects movie makeup and often comes home wearing beards or bizarre noses). She told me that she’s always wanted to be able to doodle, but over the years has never been able to come up with anything particularly interesting — interlocking lines, or curlicues at best.

However, she’s been doing a lot of drawing and rendering for her various class assignments, and so she’s been flexing that drawing muscle in new and exciting ways. She was positively glowing when she came home and announced that she had actually generated this fun little guy during a lecture in class. Ladies and gentlemen, Nikki’s first doodle.

Everyone has different levels of intrinsic drawing talent, but anyone can learn to draw — really it’s much more about practice than pure inborn talent. Some have an easier time than others, but learning the skill isn’t off-limits to anyone willing to put in the time.

Drawing: grab yer ankles

MAN HANDS

I am firmly of the opinion that drawings from life (even poor ones) have more artistic liveliness than drawings from photographs.  The process of transposing three dimensions into two gives the work an energy that cannot arise from simply copying shapes from paper.

Over time, drawings from life continue to live on and remain in many ways vibrant, regardless of whether or not they resemble the model.  And often an expressive resemblance to the model remains even when details are inaccurate — this can be seen most clearly after the passage of time, when the drawing can no longer compared to the real thing in front of it.