Welcome to 2017! Learn-Grow Drawing

Welcome to the 2017 edition of Overland Passages! I’m so excited for this year to start and to spend it learning and sharing things that interest me, I love, or, sometimes, that cause me pain, or anxiety, or despair. All of it geared toward learning.

A few weeks ago I started a post thread called “Learn-Grow,” in which I am going to share the results of choosing to learn to do something or to do something better that has always interested me, but that I’ve always felt I didn’t have the time or the blah-blah whatever to do. 

One of these things is drawing and I thought it would be a great way to begin the new year to get back to it and to continue the lessons I started in the last post.

There are 2 activities from the lesson on enhancing visual intelligence that most interested me the last time that I wrote on this that I want to focus on for now:

1. Maintain a Sketchbook: Render at least one drawing of an actual object or person every day from memory.
2. Draw Mental Images: Imagine an object or living being and draw what you are visualizing in as much detail as possible.

I don’t know if keeping a  sketchbook every day is going to work, but I’m going to do at least 2-3 a week, even if they are only a line. Also I’m going to play around with drawing digitally and with pencil. Since these 2 lessons are pretty related I am also going to just sort of conflate them into one. I am not going to share all of the results of this experiment, but I’ll try to keep my readers up to date on my progress good or bad.

The first challenge to this is trying to separate memory and image. I’ve become such a prolific capturer of moments that sometimes I’m not sure if my memory is digital or real. So the “from memory,” and “imagine” portions of these lessons could be some of the more difficult aspects (other of course than really drawing, but at least I know that I’m not good at that so it doesn’t matter so much).

The second immediate challenge is deciding how to keep this digitally organized. I am a bit obsessed by apps and so I’ve spent a good bit of time tonight deciding how I’m going to organize these. The pencil ones are easy enough, just snap a pic of a real object, but the digital ones are more of a challenge. I used to really love this app called Paper 53 as it let you organize drawings (never many, but you know), into a beautiful interface of notebooks. They have since updated, in my opinion much to the worse, to make the app more utilitarian and I’m just turned off by it, as well as they really want you to use their Pencil, an aftermarket stylus. So that’s not going to work. Instead I’m going to sketch in Procreate, the best art app I’ve seen, although just a little heavy, not much in the way of organization. So I’ll just export and save them into my journaling app, Day One. I’m sure this will evolve, so I’ll keep you up to date on that as well.

Thanks so much for reading these crazy jots and again, welcome to 2017, let’s enter it bravely and make it ours!