Beth's Ponderings
I recently heard a
person describe how your approach to drawing can mirror your approach to life,
whether you start a drawing with a pencil or whether you start with a pen.
In drawing, using a
pencil - with a really good eraser - allows you to make changes as you go along. You don’t have to worry about making a
mistake as you can easily fix it. If you
change your mind, you can erase what you did and do something else. In no way are you stuck with what you did if
you don’t like it, or it doesn’t look like you want it to look.
But, one drawback is
that because you CAN make changes and erase, so many do. Rather than trusting themselves, they
repeatedly second-guess their choices and keep redoing their drawings over and
over until they are left with just a big mess, and not the beautiful drawing they
wanted.
Now using a pen
requires a different approach. As there
is no eraser - no easy out - you need to be sure, and commit to making marks on
the page. The result is more decisive,
and strokes tend to be more bold compared to the lighter more tentative ones of
a pencil user.
Some people fear
using a pen as there is no way to erase mistakes, but while more commitment to
your work is required with pen, you still aren’t locked in if you make a mark
you don’t like. There are still options:
you can accept it and keep going, you can make the mark into something else and
allow the direction of your drawing to change, or you can get a new piece of
paper and start over completely.
And it’s the same
in life.
Now neither method
is right or wrong, nor is one method necessarily better than the other. They are just two different approaches, one
is about playing it safer, and one is about taking a risk. Each has value, depending on what you are
doing, and what your desired end result is.
Yet, in drawing, as
in life, we tend to get further along the path to our dreams if we are more
decisive and commit to an action than if we keep second-guessing ourselves and
never actually finish anything.
Beth
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