Observation.
Beyond hand/eye coordination, and a desire to make art, one key technique in creating art, is Observation. Paying attention. Looking, seeing, looking again, and seeing – repeatedly, for hours on end. It requires a unique meditation type of patience.
This post is about representational art, which is one style of Art, and a great skill for artists to master. When artists have this ability, they have a choice to use it or not. Without this ability artists are quite limited, and are often intimidated by the task and afraid they will get the details wrong.
The first step to accurately represent something in a drawing or painting, is first see it well.
Noticing, and observing is learning and recognizing, assimilating what is being looked at, and understanding the details of what defines it.
Mapping out and placing representational details on a page or canvas to artistically recreate it, requires noticing features and reproducing those aspects, relative all other details, including spacial orientation and proportional composition.
Too many Art students learn to create without ever really paying attention to the item they are recreting, which leads to a serious disadvantage.
When I was in my last quarter of college before I graduated with a BFA, I took a Science Illustration class. It was the single class that had far better artists in it than any of my other Art classes.
This class happened to be attended mostly by science majors, and only a handful of other artists. You might think that the artists who had studied Art and painted for most of their lives would have out-shined the other students by a long shot.
However in this class it was the Science students' work that shown far better than the Art students' work. I noticed a remarkable thing: Science students' ability to pay attention; to observe, notice identifying features and then slowly meticulously document those details in marks on the page. These skills are crucial in order to most accurately as possible represent a depicted item.
After watching Science students illustrate a botanical sample or a preserved racoon, I noticed very careful, deliberate, disciplined students accustomed to studying details, attentively observing what they saw. They were in no rush.
Which led to me note a huge difference between Artists in my classes and the Science students. Art Students seem to always be short on time, or in a frantic race to a finish, as if they were on to their next project shortly after the first one began.
Artists I witnessed, looked at their reference item, briefly, sometimes only once for just a second to get an idea of what they saw, and then drew a lot, sometimes for fifteen to twenty minutes before looking up at the item again. They tended to paint what they felt, or an impression of what they saw, without rechecking back to the reference item being drawn. They carried on with their drawing or painting, from memory, and the image quickly became something either only loosely related to the item being drawn, or something else entirely. This lack of referencing the object being drawn, as a way of creating is prominent in Art Students.
In contrast, Science students frequently look to the thing they are drawing, always checking and rechecking the reference item for how it really looks, so they really get to know it, intimately; they study it all along.
So anytime you feel stuck, or unsure of whether you are representing the item you are depicting, stop, take a breath, slow down. Look longer at what you are creating, just observe, study what you see.
Observing will help you be more confident about what you see, which will help you make more confident marks, and give you more options to how you depict what you are creating. It is a perfect place to pause any time you feel stuck, simply see, relax, and carry-on.
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