Finding Your Inner Artist

It has struck me recently how many creative and talented colleagues and friends I have and I wanted to showcase some of their creations and stories for you.

I have known Steph for over 30 years and have spent a good portion of that sharing creative endeavours with her – from garden design through to card making. I have always been impressed with her dedication to practicing her drawing and painting: working her way through books, doing daily challenges and learning new techniques (many of which she shared with me in our card making challenges).

Steph says:

I don’t believe there is any such thing as a gift for drawing or painting, all you need is the desire, and practice. For some people the desire can be strong, and show early in their lives, so they seem to have a head start on the rest of us, but I do believe it is a need to create, not a gift.

(In my opinion Steph’s patience is a gift – I also wanted to learn how to paint and draw; the desire was strong but the patience to practice in order to become anywhere near capable enough to produce what I desired was severely lacking. But that’s another story.)

Steph has always loved drawing, especially illustrating the stories she wrote at primary school. But by the time she was 10, she had passed out of the ‘symbolic’ stage that kids go through, drawing stick figures for people and squares for houses, and then she was stuck, wanting to draw more realistically but not knowing how.

When Steph was in her mid 20’s, she came across the now iconic book by Betty Edwards: Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, and bought a copy. She wasn’t ready to teach herself to draw at that point, but knew that when she was, she would work her way through the book and she would be able to draw when she finished. Betty Edwards had said so!

By the time she turned 38 Steph was ready: learning to draw was her goal for that year. She had in mind that she wanted to be drawing and painting by the time she was 40, and wanted to give herself plenty of time.

I gathered pencils and paper and with a feeling of ceremony I went to the bookshelf for the familiar bright-orange book. This time I wasn’t going to just pick it up and put it down again as I had done off and on over the last 15 years – this time was for real… except that I couldn’t find it. The orange spine had faded to a nondescript grey and it took a lot of searching as I kept looking for what I remembered, not what was there – a life lesson if ever there was one!

What had spurred Steph to learn to draw was a desire to paint on silk. She had bought all the gear: how-to books, silk paints, frame and the silk itself. However before she started she reasoned that she should teach herself to paint (in watercolours) before painting on silk, and that she should really learn to draw before she learnt to paint. In practice she loved drawing, and then watercolour painting, so much that she gave away the silk painting equipment, and invested in watercolour paints, brushes and paper instead.

Steph is self-taught both for drawing and painting in that she hasn’t been to any classes or workshops, but rather learning entirely from books and heaps of practice. It took her about 18 months to work her way through the drawing exercises in Betty Edward’s book, doing a bit each week. She wanted learning to draw to be fun and without pressure. She started learning to paint once she felt she could draw adequately, but she still draws a lot, trying different media like charcoal and pens as well as pencils.

Learning to paint in watercolours seemed natural as Steph has always loved that type of painting. She got books out of the library and worked her way through the exercises, doing lots of colour-mixing charts when she wanted to mess about with paints but not actually paint anything.

As well as working her way through books, Steph sets herself self-challenges like doing a drawing-a-day for a year. While in Level Four lockdown for COVID19 she started painting a simple image each day, in just black and white. That was in part to practice getting a good range of values in a painting but also to reflect our severe lack of choice and freedom while at Level Four.

 

She has also just finished a challenge to draw or paint 100 faces. Steph started this about a year ago from a project in a book, but gave up after about 20 faces. Then while confined to her bubble she wanted to have something to show for the time she spent at home so decided to get the next 80 faces done before the end of Level Three. She thinks her results are evidence of improvement if you practice something enough.

Steph’s drawing and painting has always been a personal journey but about 15 years ago she decided that she liked her paintings enough to turn them into cards and share some of her art with friends and family. Twenty years of card making helped in that process too. She goes though the year’s paintings to see which one appeals most.

Sometimes I’m pleased with a painting but the subject isn’t right for a card, or the colour contrast isn’t good enough to scan well. Sometimes the format isn’t right and I have to do a bit of cropping. I choose two or three (if I’m lucky!) and try them out by scanning and then printing them and see if they look like a good card image. I don’t do any photo-shopping as I don’t want the final card to be too different from the original painting. Interestingly often the best paintings were practice pieces!

She the scans, reduces and prints the pictures onto glossy photo paper, and then it is just a matter of cutting and adhering the pictures to folded card stock – and she has any number of cards to send.

Steph is also a member of the NZ Fellowship of Artists and has found it to be very interesting, helping her to consolidate her thoughts on art in general. She did exhibit two paintings and with that realised that she is not interested in exhibiting or selling. Both paintings were labelled ‘not for sale’ but that didn’t really fit with the aim of the Fellowship which is to encourage artists who want to sell, and provide them with exposure and experience.

A few years ago she went to the judging of a painting competition.

The organisers had brought in a judge who explained her process for choosing a winning painting and quite frankly I was horrified. She said she would stand in the doorway of the gallery and cast her eyes around all the paintings quickly. She would then note half a dozen that appealed to her, either because of colour choice, use of values or subject matter, and go up to each in turn. She would eliminate ones which had ‘broken the rules’ with shadows in the wrong direction, poor perspective etc and come up with the First, Second and Third. One thing she said she hated was to come across two or three paintings by the same artist in the same competition and if she did, she eliminated that artist from her list without considering their work.

What was a revelation to me was that the judge was first attracted to the paintings she liked, and ended up with the three she liked the most. This isn’t about good or bad art, it is about what appealed to her as an individual. Since then, and in talking with other artists and from what I have read, I have decided that no art is good or bad, it is only ever liked or not liked. Yes, there are ‘rules’, but they have value only because if you follow them, you are more likely to produce art that is liked.

 

No art is good or bad, it is only ever liked or not liked. It is what appeals to you as an individual and art is a very personal thing. So if you have a desire to create then go ahead and do it, practice, challenge yourself and have fun along the way to finding your inner artist. Thank you Steph for your inspirational story.

(And I have to say that Steph pretty much wrote this post herself because she gave me such a wealth of information to use.)