Most days I like to consider myself an artist. Lately, though, I’ve had to face the fact that I’m an artist who has skimped badly on building her foundation.
What I’m referring to specifically is perspective. Oh, sure, I can draw your basic box in simple 1, 2 or even 3 point perspective, but a circle? curve? complex object?
While I do love my abstracts, it’s only half of what I want to do. As an artist it’s very frustrating to not be able to draw an image when it pops into my head. So I’ve decided to go back and study perspective until I “get it”… and then practice it frequently so I don’t lose it.
I think my problem all along has been that I’ve always seen the issue of perspective as a problem to be overcome for whichever project I was working on at the time. I’ve always managed to muck through it and come up with a solution for the problem. But somehow I’ve always managed to come away from each problem without having learned anything.
I’ve decided that my entire approach is wrong. It’s a tool to be used, not a problem to be overcome. Once I have a firm understanding of it, once it’s second nature to me, it wont be a problem. It’s only a problem now because, hey, I just wanted to draw cool stuff, not work with boring lines and vanishing points and junk.
In retrospect it was a bit like trying to write a book without first learning the alphabet…
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