That's it, you've decided to move on to serious things recently. After copying tons and tons of drawings, photos, and even models from nature, you feel ready to draw imagination and show the world the fruit of your hard work.
You prize your most beautiful HB pencil and a nice A4 sheet with a slight granulation. You are comfortably seated in your chair, now in a fighting position, you erratically pencil from left and right. However, the more you advance in your creation, and the more you feel uncomfortable invade you. You then take a step back above your sketch and you see with terror that you draw as a child!
You who copy your favorite heroes to perfection, or who have spent an unthinkable time reproducing the most difficult models in a time that would make them blush more than one.
How is it possible? Would not you in the end be a copying machine?
Rest assured, I sincerely think that 99% of the artists went through there, if not 100%.
The reason for this difference is simple, the observation drawing and the imagination drawing do not involve the same parts of the brain. These are two totally different brain activities. (Attention I am not talking about the gesture itself, but the processes of integration and the mental processes that intervene just before drawing a line.)
Why such a difference?
"Drawing remains of the drawing" might say some, as others might reply in an equally unthinking way: "It is the hand that draws, not the head." Yet all your motor patterns are native to certain synaptic networks of your brain, and the gestures of drawing are part of it. The hand is only an actress, a simple tool at the end of the motor chain. The brain is the project leader: he is the one who plans every gesture. Without you doing a course of neuroanatomy that would surely bar you as much as I (we are here to draw by to philosophize, name of a dog! 😉), I want you to understand this: the brain will draw in different networks of neurons According as you draw imagination or observation; The information does not transit in the same way according to one or the other.
To explain to you as simply as possible, I would tend to put forward four great notions that differentiate the imagination drawing from the drawing after model:
- Comprehension
- Three-dimensional visualization
- The visual memory
- Imagination
Understanding the real world
One must be curious enough to understand what surrounds us. Some individuals, depending on their intellectual capacities, education and experience, can go through life without thinking too much about why and how. Curiosity is not a bad defect when one wants to understand the mechanisms and mechanisms of the environment that animates our daily life. A curious artist will be more likely to surprise the public than a passive artist who remains in his comfort zone and who does not make the effort to learn new things.
To help you, here are the questions you can ask yourself when you are observant and curious:
Nature: in what matter is the object? What is it made of? Does it look like something I already know? Can I compare it to something I've already observed? What is its internal and external structure? What is his story? If it is a living object: how is it animated? What does it remind me when it is moving? Is it made up of a skeleton or is it simply animated by contractile tissues? What kind of behavior does it have? Etc.
Three-dimensional visualization
In other words, it is the mental projection of what one wants to draw in a three-dimensional world. It is a very difficult activity and it is acquired with a lot of effort and experience.
Mentally planning a drawing is a bit like playing chess, the more you are competent in this activity, and the more you are able to anticipate a maximum of moves in advance. Which means you know where you go before you put each stroke. Remember this point. The activities and skills that can greatly help 3D visualization are:
3D modeling: install for example google sketchup (free software) on your computer and have fun building simple shapes and moving the camera at your leisure. By seeing objects move in three dimensions, you can better reproduce the perspectives you want to use in your drawing.
Sculpture: this activity strongly develops visualization in three dimensions. Building a step-by-step creation in volume causes the brain to represent and manipulate shapes at will. The big advantage of the sculpture is that you will have a better understanding of the volumes, since it is you who will have built your work from beginning to end. If you do not have room for real sculpture, here is an example of a good sculpting paste used in some of the big art schools. If you do not have the place, there are very good software like Sculptris (free). Try, you may have fun. For info, I use the 4R3 version of the Zbrush software (paying). I use Zbrush for a long time, but I admit that it is a bit complex at first.
Imagination
Imagination is closely linked to inspiration. It is in fact the way we mix our internal visual library with the elements of reality. You can never really create something completely original. It is mother nature that guides our imagination from beginning to end. We merely blend the elements of reality into our minds. The more we are able to mix complex concepts, the more powerful our imagination. If our internal image library (from our medium and long term visual memory) is well provided, it will be all the easier to merge them with existing photo references or a model from nature.
Ask an architect to build a solid building. It will be much easier for him to construct the building with his own hands (even if in itself it is the skill of the worker), only for a lambda individual who knows nothing about it.
Conclusion
Keep in mind that imagination can be the final stage of an artist's culmination. Of course, we can always help ourselves with photo references when creating an illustration (besides I strongly recommend it). However, it is always good to try to observe, to understand the functioning of the objects and the living beings that surround us. One can improve his drawing only by being an observer, without drawing a single stroke, simply by dragging his brain to analyze a visual.
So it's not because you do not have a sketchbook on you, that it's not worth observing, quite the opposite. Get used to observing and understanding what surrounds you. Interest in everything. No small miracle pill will think, will be attentive and will only take time to observe for you.
If you prefer to stick to the drawing of observation (drawing "passive", as I call it), it is much better for you, the essential thing is to have fun drawing. Conversely, making your own illustrations, with your own ideas, your own style is a difficult task, which takes years; It will take patience because learning to draw is also learning to imagine.
