Note: There’s a gallery of drawings I made a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away at the bottom of this post!
It’s crazy, the amount of times in school some random kid would come up to me, pretending to be my best buddy wanting me to draw them something crude and completely stupid. I’d spend 10 minutes drawing something like a picture of them with muscles or some kind of ‘well-endowed’ female…
Teenagers, am I right?
Of course five minutes later the so called ‘friendship’ would be in a completely different state! It’s pretty funny but not exactly surprising. I was no longer their ‘best friend’!
What people don’t tell you about talented artists
“You’re so talented!” or “He (or she) has always been able to draw like that!” are common phrases.
For a while I myself thought that drawing was something I was born with. As if birth was an image of me strolling out of the womb with a box of pencils and a sketch pad, drawing pictures for the doctor to run off and show his colleagues…
Doctors… Am I Right??
Seriously though, I later remembered rocking up to the first grade and seeing the other kids draw pictures and then me being utterly hopeless at it. But being a person who couldn’t draw well was something I didn’t like, so I remember some rather obsessive days drawing, trying to get better.
It got to the point where my school books had drawings in every corner of the page and I was always drawing. Constantly.
You see, all artists had ridiculous hours of practice. As Will Smith says “talent you have naturally, but skill comes from hours and hours of beating on your craft”.
It’s not a ‘gift’. While some luck may be involved, skilled artistry is very much earned through hours of obsessive practice. Now here’s a picture of Rayden from Mortal Kombat…
It also develops the desire to create.
I spent hours every single day doodling, drawing and constantly training my finer drawing skills and every single other person you know who ‘draws’ has spent a massive chunk of their life doing it. As you find yourself creating images it becomes a fascination with creation in imagery in general.
That’s why many artists go from drawing to painting or sculpting. They want to see their imagination come to life. As an older adult it becomes a method for expressing concepts or observations about life and they become somewhat able to be interpreted in many different unplanned ways.
But I was a computer geek. Big Time.
Did you see the picture of Rayden above? He’s a video game character from Mortal Kombat! (Man I loved that game). See – Computer geek!
Oh, and here is a picture of Bruce Lee…
Digital imagery and Creativity walk hand in hand.
When the concept of computer art caught my attention I went totally nuts all over again – it was another medium of creation I could use effectively!
It took a love of computers and creation in to the digital world. More-so, it became an obsession with showing my craft to the world, so I dove headfirst into creating websites and after being shown the basics, taught myself huge amounts of technical skills to make this happen.
Then I started going to a Multimedia course, filling in the gaps and it then developed naturally into design as a career.
This can all start as a child OR as an adult.
Digital tools are no different from real life tools. You have to learn how they work, when to use them and have the overall vision to aim for. A digital canvas is no different than a real one.
Purists would argue, but these people don’t understand the concept of creating art through tools, both sides have advantages and disadvantages, strengths and weaknesses.
So art leading to design is no different.
Art is very expressive but it still has guidelines for the final product – your vision, using certain objects to express your message or even just being able to make something recognizable enough so that anyone viewing it can see what you want them to see.
Design is about function, guiding the eye to where you want it to go – a business name or a phone number, whilst passing on the message – we clean pools and we’re very organized! Similar concepts but very different kinds of art.
The big difference? The function comes before the art, the customer’s vision before your vision. So it can become more difficult, but you get different ideas to express through your medium.
I hope that makes sense! Here’s some pictures.
So you get the idea? Well if not, leave a comment below.
But this is also my portfolio so I wanted to show off some of my images I drew way back in the day. These are starting to show some age, but as a lot of (current) posts are about my early work, I thought this suiting.
Thanks for reading and checking out my old drawings. Naturally I’ll be doing more digital and ‘real-world’ art in the future! So keep checking back!
