Practice Makes Progress

In a Tribute to Perseverance, I noted that I would approach my future drawing studies with more patience, appreciation, and perseverance. It has been a rather intimidating but rewarding process and practice in which at first, I was a reluctant participant with little direction other than knowing I wanted to draw more stuff and improve over time. At the time of the article, I had started studying how to draw faces from YouTube videos and with each subsequent week, created a new face drawing from my mind’s eye showing some improvement in some areas but not others.

My goal determined – practice to make progress rather than practice to achieve perfection – was my path to take, the former a far wiser choice and more gracious to the soul. I continued to draw from my imagination and from inspiration from tv shows where imagined beauties from an ancient past came to life.

I drew when I was bored, busy, happy, or sad. I drew every day, everywhere, on anything. It became a welcomed escape from the occasional doldrums of everyday life.

I felt it important to show my progress and receive feedback which in turn contributed to my efforts in posting consistently online. After I completed each drawing, I posted it and found my social media connections to be very supportive and helpful even pushing me to improve my skills by challenging me to draw their own faces. It wasn’t until, Paul Mellender recommended a couple of books – Artistic Anatomy by Richer Hale and Charles Bargue’s Drawing Course – to assist me in my efforts, that something really clicked.

This was a pivotal point in my drawing process. I drew hundreds of practice drawings and found that the fundamental rules introduced in the drawing exercises were extremely helpful when applied to drawings of real people. With this technical instruction alleviating some of the inaccuracies in my drawings, I could now focus on the more personal connection of drawing people’s faces.

Time spent grew exponentially with each new creation and as time went by, I came to recognize and appreciate the minute details of people’s faces and the stories they had to tell. Each unique face held evidence of life’s experiences from puck marks – the immature bliss of teenage life, and wrinkles and old scars – a life well lived or much suffered. Each unique face held tiny terrains that seemed more alien than I had ever comprehended – the curled runway of a lash and the inconsistent placement of each, skipping one to the other from its place of birth, and pitted skin caressing whispers of facial hair undulating across its vast landscape. Or the starburst rugged-edged pupil with surrounding iris fibers outstretched as if to grab onto wonders just witnessed. These all amount to visual poetry.

These little imperfections make up one glorious whole – begging to be captured for eternity within the graphite strokes pressed upon paper. I began to fall in love with these little details and with each new scape I discovered and replicated, came a new appreciation and obsession to continue to create and build upon it. It is a terrestrial wonder – our personal and internal universe. All taken for granted by so many.

With these realizations, my focus became micro instead of macro – intimate rather than distant. I became laser focused. I found myself looking at people in a whole new way – in this version of a microscopic visual world, I had long forgotten. The more deeply I studied intricacies, the more I realized that faces held hundreds of insinuations and indentations crafted by dots, shadows, and highlights – hints of stories untold.

This journey has given me a revitalized joy. It gave me and continues to give me pause – time to stop and enjoy and look into the faces of my brothers and sisters and see them as they are. To study them, to gaze into their eyes where kindness lies, even if set on weary faces weathered from years of life’s evolution and retrogression. I imagine this is what the photographer, painter, and artist see and experience – this is why we do what we do. We do it for the visual poetry, to tell the untold story, to express grace, and refabricate beauty in a world that needs more of it. I wholeheartedly and humbly continue practicing artful studies in my pursuit of progress and hope to someday set my pieces alongside such amazing artists as Paul Mellender and Jono Dry.

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Be good and do good. And remember, express yourself in any way that brings you joy and relief and share it with the world. You don’t owe it to anyone but yourself. Stay happy, healthy, safe, and happy graphics, my friend.

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