ErikL

Name: Erik La Gattuta

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ErikL's Recent Comments
March 12, 2008 11:19 am

I've been teaching perceptual drawing and painting for the better part of a decade, and this experience has led me to the following conclusions:

When an artist draws a human figure (or anything else) they inevitably use one of four sources:  they are looking at a real, three dimensional model; they are looking at a photograph of a model; they are looking at another drawing (theirs or another artist's); or they are drawing from their imagination.  

When are artist draws from imagination, they are invariably drawing on the memory of drawings they have done from one of the other three sources.  In other words: all drawing is copying.  Sometimes it might be from memory, but it is always 100% of the time copying, and it has been ever since someone first picked up a burnt stick and made a mark on a cave wall.  

It's interesting to me that people who do not draw often hold tightly to this myth of the artist as pure, protean creator.  No artist is. We see stuff; we think it's cool; we copy it; after a while we've copied enough things that our original sources get hard to pick out, but they are still there and occasionally they are still obvious. It is certainly true that each artist adds their own touch--these are habits of mind and hand that cannot be helped or faked--usually in the spots where they've made mistakes! 

That's how a visual art tradition works--and comics is certainly no exception.

How many ways are there to draw a person standing in profile?