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bathroom fish - pen drawing |
Besides the usual knee-jerk eat better, get fit, call your mother more often (all of which I am doing quite successfully so far) I have resolved to do an observational drawing every day. In a shiny new sketchbook. It doesn't seem very much, for an artist, yet surprisingly difficult to keep up when you are thinking "I spent all day drawing animated fish, now I have to do a flippin still life?" and when dark evenings mean drawing indoor things (yes I could draw in the mornings, but that's when Im now going running!) and you suddenly realise how much you want to explore the vague and raggedy-edged shapes of the garden, the neighbours' ivy-loaded tree, organic things, instead of hard-edged manufactured objects and square walls. How the cat can sit immobile for 6 hours but begin to prowl when you decide to draw her.
Like the running, it's an exercise - for the drawing muscles. Building up stamina, imaginative capacity, interpretive ability, libraries of sorts of marks. But what begins as a discipline soon becomes a delight. Probably endorphins.