Drawing – out of my comfort zone

I’m reading a book by Dianne Mize, Finding Freedom to Create – A Painter’s Road Map.  And yesterday on my walk back from White Horse Coffee Shoppe, I was looking at everything with the possibility of drawing it.  Kind of drawing with my hand in the air.

Mize presents drawing as a response.  It’s just something you do.  You don’t have to think, “Am I good at it.”  It doesn’t matter.  Everyone has their own unique way of responding.  She mentioned the limits of step by step painting.  She talked about how much you lose in terms of your own composition by just tracing.  And so last night I drew a sketch based on a photograph, not tracing.  Then, this morning, I brought it into Illustrator.

There was a purveyor of cheese at a weekday market that we saw in Dordogne on a bike ride several years ago who let me take his photo. What I love about drawing this scene from a photo is that I can continue to appreciate the experience.  I did do this on the computer, obviously.

I’ve been thinking about maps the same way.  Making a map, is, like in drawing, a response. And if you haven’t just gone through the motions and performed some styling to existing data, you can get a lot out of the process.  Sometimes the story experience in a place, just can’t be shown on a project for a client.  But it can influence what you do anyway.

Photography has a lot of merit, and digitally reworking a photo does too.  These are both responses.  You frame a photo when you take it.  You determine the zoom level.  And in working with it in Photoshop, you can call attention to what you are seeing.

Right now, what I really need is to draw so that the connection between what I see and what goes on the paper is filtered through my memory and presented through a direct action.