My brother was in my room today, because he was meant to take the front cover of Familiarity Breaks. Unfortunately we didn’t because he spent the whole day sleeping. He got up from his room, went to my room, and asked me when I wanted him to start. I said now, he said he just got up, and then he rested on my bed playing games on his phone adjusting to being awake. He stays up and has all nighters too much. Sometimes he goes 3 days without sleep.
He looked on my bed and he saw a see through plastic clipboard with paper in it. He wondered why I would have such a thing. He tiled it round. I told him not to look in it. I knew that he would. “What’s in there?” he asked. “A drawing I did. It’s a bit shameful, it’s the first time I ever drew something, so it’s a bit rubbish. It’s shameful.” He looked at it, and said it was good. He was surprised by how good it was.
Click the image below for a zoom in. You can tell it’s my first serious drawing, because it has #1 on it, and of course I titled it and put my name on it. Remember dat trust me! I brought proper artist colouring pencils, pencils of different thickness, and charcoal pencils. I even used the white pencil and 2 coloured pens. I drew it last year in August 2010.
My sister said years ago, that I draw how I write. I agree.
He said it was good again, and he was surprised by how good it was. “I tried to get the perspective in. I drew it in town [city centre], near the Pallasades [shopping centre], I had to hold a pencil up like this – to get the perspective.” I held a pencil up to show him. He said that he couldn’t do that and get perspective. He’s doing a graphic design course, and I don’t draw, and he has a sketchbook. I now know even more than I’m better than him at something. He’s better than me at a lot of things, so it balances out.
“It took me hours to do that.” It actually took me the whole day! “People
were stopping me on the street, saying that it’s good. I even had this
man stop me, asking me if I draw portraits, because he wanted me to
draw his daughter. I said no, and told it was my first time. I can’t
draw faces, they’re too hard.”
“Really?”, he asked himself surprised rhetorically. He knew I wasn’t lying. “You know what you should do? You should go and do live drawing?”
“What’s that?”
“Drawing naked bodies, so you can learn about anatomy.”
I looked at him for a second, and looked completely shocked. “Nah! What kind of a – Nah! I won’t be doing that! Nah! That’s a bit wrong. I’m not drawing naked bodies. Forget that.”
He
told me there was nothing wrong with it, and that’s how artists learn
how to draw people to scale. He said that proper artists know how to
draw the skeleton, and that they can draw my skeleton just by looking
at me.
I then said, “I made a big mistake in this image. You see here?” I circled a piece on my artwork. “There’s a bit missing here. The building doesn’t really go straight like that. Also, I missed out a lot of details in the picture, so I could fit it all to scale. When you look at the bottom picture, the thing on the left is a building, and there’s stone flooring on the ground. Can you tell that the building is above the ground, and does it look 3D? Is it just flat? Can you tell that the bus is a bus, or does it just look like a square?” He looked at me and said, “It looks like sludge” to be sarcastic. I asked him if the bus looked like a bus, and he said it looked like sludge again. He thinks I over analyse myself and be critical to myself, which I don’t.
My brother was being stupid! He was saying stupid stuff to tease me! He knew I would react like that.
I wonder what would have happened to me, if I had pursued drawing years ago from a young age. Not much, I think. My brother has people on his graphic design course, who can draw. And one of them is a freelancer for Disney. The standard for the people who get accepted onto that course, is high; but there isn’t necessarily high standards required to get on the course.
If I was a graphic designer, I would be building up my portfolio. My brother is too lazy to do that. When he was in college, he went the whole year without handing any work for art! He used to use charisma to charm teachers into thinking he was doing work, when he wasn’t. Talking about comics, so his teachers think he’s doing work about comics. He is on it. I rate him for that. I wish I could do that! He laughs about it, and he’s proud of it. I want to be proud of that as well. I would have loved to get to university for a course, without handing any work in for that specific course in college. We both went to sixth form.
