Day 36

heya guys, day 36 it's ON!
First off be warned, today's post might get pretty ranty, but I think that there are some things happening with me as far as I view drawing and painting which are really going to change me and the way I handle all this both from a pure abstract aspect of how I think about "art" and also from a purely technical standpoint of how I go about making images.
The second thing I want to absolutely stress is that everything I think and write are ultimatively things that I THINK I am discovering for myself here, that is to say I don't mean anything here from an educational standpoint. All I am doing is posting my thoughts and being absolutely open for them being bullshit or just simply totally wrong. SO while I do think that I am progressing here I also know that I know nothing and nothing I say should be taken for a fact even if it seems to work for me haha. Just take everything with a huge bigass grain of salt :D

I kind of hinted at this in a previous post but I want to get deeper into it because the changes I am currently making in the way I think about painting and go about actually doing it are much deeper than I would have expected before I just tried playing around and changing things up. It's also weird that those ridiculous perspective exercises kind of got the ball rolling with me rethinking everything I am doing when it comes to drawing haha. SO yea this is what it's all about right now:

Up until the last few weeks my process of drawing and general thinking about "art" was extremely technical, not only in studies (where it is okay and often the point to be technical) but also in my personal work, from finished Illustrations to even sketchwork. Every figure I drew would be deliberately constructed in a way I saw in this or that book/video. For every head I drew I would start with the classical loomis construction head and then put my headdrawing on top of that, I was obsessed with making everything look correct, going about drawing the way it is "taught". The problem with this is that I was not actually noticing it or better said I did not notice that I was completely caught up in those thought patterns not even starting to think that there was anything wrong about doing things this way. I mean I was drawing that way since I started basically, I just believed that this is the right way to do it.

Now a couple of months ago (maybe something like two months before I started this blog) I noticed "Damn, constructing the shit out of everything does not do me any good, I construct everything the way it's supposed to be and I end up with something I have to correct anyways". So out of this and my flawed mindset sprang the though "alright I need to improve my construction skills!". And that's what I tried to do, I got back to all the basics catching up on the construction part, focused on getting my base constructions even more correct, the divisions on the loomis head even more accurate before I drew the head on top of it. Sometimes I would use a ruler to check if my "division of thirds" was absolutely perfect and I was so happy when I finally got that right. BUT and here is the thing that devestated me: My drawings got worse.......like WAY worse and not even that, everything started looking the same (especially obvious in my head studies from memory).
It was that point where I started to doubt everything I have been doing so far, thoughts started creeping in about how much time I might have wasted trying to go about drawing the wrong way, only restricting myself instead of opening up , it really really scared me a lot. You know, I thought I was in charge of my own improvement, totally knowing where I need to go but now I was left with nothing, for the first time in years I felt totally lost. I mean I got to a place with my artwork and also jobwise but still I was feeling lost, literally not knowing what to do.
I figured the only way for me to get out of that is a complete reset, rethinking and redoing everything I assumed would be right and true about this whole art thing but instead of just totally changing up everything I would get rid of each of my habits one by one and just see what would happen.

This is where this blog starts and now after a bit more than a month of investing around 3 hours a day into just basic studying of process and painting/drawing itself I think I am safe to say that doing this was probably the best decision for me (as an artist) in the last few years even.

To recap what was going on on this blog in case you did not see all of it or you just did not notice it:
I have been tackling very specific subjects (figuredrawings, portraitdrawings/paintings, lifedrawings, moviestills) and I started with every one of them the way I used to work, very constructive, very technical and I would  go on with every study and gradually remove all the technical layins and constructions and do what might be called "just draw/paint", just going for it and trusting myself with it and it's insane but as soon as I did that I started feeling better about my work, the studies got better, things were much clearer for me, everything started feeling kind of smooth and "clicking". Also everything would translate much more easily into my own personal paintings and clientwork, it was a crazy experience really.

Now after I experienced this over and over with every new subject I was tackling for some reason (and I feel so stupid realizing it so LATE, YEARS after I started drawing) I noticed "wait a minute, every artist you admire and have seen painting ever has "just been painting" whenever he/she started a new picture. Litereally noone ever starts with loomis constructions NOT A SINGLE ONE.

And here's the point (and this is also the point that I am open to being wrong but right nwo today it feels like the biggest truth ever for me so I'll go with it for now): All of those artist I look up to KNOW that stuff, they all know loomisheads and anatomyconstruction and all the technicalities but they don't actually DRAW them down when they paint. That stuff is in their heads as reference to pull from when they "just do it". Those things are guides not literal frameworks to work in when painting a picture. knowledge of a book or a video is JUST THE SAME thing in your visual library as lets say the knowledge you get from a photostudy. Ultimately a loomis head is a REFERENCE not a METHOD to draw a head (even if its presented as this in the books).
I know this might sound obvious but for me this is a profound realization right now and the base to completely change the way I treat painting and drawing, it's really a bit insane for me at the moment how much of an revelation it feels.
For the first time in years I can "just draw" and the results are getting so much better than what I was able to do when I trapped myself in technicalities and constructions and literally drawing on top of diagrams.

I was struggling with that realization as I was drawing those little portraits. I skipped back and forth between the old way of loomis heads as bases for the actual drawing and the way of just starting to draw however I feel and in my opininon when I look at the drawings of the last 3 days it is so obvious to me which ones have been drawn which way. All the wonky ones (they are all still pretty wonky but I am talking about the ones that stand out in this regard) are the ones drawn with an actual loomis construcion as a base and all of those have skewed proportions, the features don't line up correctly, they look really really stiff and forced and thus the liknesses are total shit. And to be honest how could they not?

So yea what I want to get to and what the result of all those weird insights is is the fact that I am going to (and actually am in the middle of) changing my whole approach of image making, I have enough proof now that I have been kind of screwing myself out of the fixated assumption of knowing what the "right way" should be. Instead I am going towards a mindset of "just doing it" and merely refering to all that constructional and technical knowledge as I need it and not use it as a template to force my drawings in.
And yea again, maybe it is totally wrong, maybe it is so right that it seems weird that it took me so long to get this, I don't know but I am pumped as hell, I think some great things can happen here :)

ugh this is a long one, please excuse posible typos and general weirdness I am trying so hard to keep ym eyes open right now, good night everyone :D