The problem of WHAT to paint comes up very frequently for many people who want to start, or restart drawing and painting. When you think about it, we are all surrounded by subject matter wherever you live, indoors and out…
One starting point is rather obvious – choose something of particular interest to you, or perhaps something you enjoyed drawing /painting previously. Shoes, cooking utensils, pots and pans, cutlery, bicycles (or parts of bicycles), plants or flowers, fruit or vegetables, bits of jewellery, dishes,, nuts and bolts, spanners, in fact ANYTHING! I am focusing here on domestic items that are available to anyone, in any room in your house…..In the last post I wrote about making the whole thing easy, inexpensive and simple to get started – this post is to make subject matter easy too. In short, use what you have in front of you, there is nothing out of bounds. Forget the idea that you need a formal still – life arrangement with prize roses in a solid silver bowl, sitting on an antique lace mat all lit by moonlight… the point is the DRAWING, not really the subject! You can spend time and effort on choosing special meaningful items later.!
The idea here is to just start making marks on a surface. The size of the paper or card doesn’t matter – lots of students are sure that smaller is easier or more manageable. Bigger surface can mean a bigger drawing? One simple exercise is to take something familiar (a pair of specs maybe, yours or borrowed) set yourself a time limit, maybe half an hour. Now make about 8 or nine drawings of them – no, put away the rubber to correct wrong bits!!!
And as this is a quick exercise, stop criticising – leave the wrong line and draw over it! And adopt an attitude of DON’T CARE! You will find that the 8th drawing will be better than the first one, because you have let go of your idea of making it perfect, and realised that as this is an exercise, it doesn’t matter!
One other thing. if you decide to practice by drawing anything alive (human or animal inhabitants of your household, this is fine too, at this point make the drawing quite fast, and dare I say a bit careless? No need for totally still poses for hours – and I have watched my cat, after sleeping for seven hours in one place, suddenly get up, stretch and walk away at the first stroke of a drawing implement……… more on this next time!
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