bloodteethandflame

My only anxiety is what I can do… Could I not be of use and good for something?….This world only concerns me insofar as I feel a certain debt and duty towards it and out of gratitude want to leave some souvenir in the shape of drawings or pictures…to express sincere human feeling.  

                                                                                           – Vincent Van Gogh

~~~

This past month, I’ve been doing a lot of drawing.

I’ve still yet to put any of my artwork on DeviantArt, but I’ve got quite a stack now, so stay tuned.

For one thing, I’ve been getting a lot of practice drawing facial expressions – including lots of noses.  (I’m getting better at drawing noses, so that’s a plus.)

Such as it is, I’m really pleased with yesterday’s sketch – which came together relatively quickly –  but I have to do some clean-up on it, or otherwise I’d be posting it.

~~~

I had just been saying to a dear friend that I very rarely draw things directly out of my head, as I often use photos or at the very least, I’ll do a few body/face/positioning studies before I actually draw anything.  Within about twenty minutes from ending the conversation – and having not much intent to draw anything moments before – I found myself absentmindedly sketching a face on my drawing pad.

And next thing I know, a whole scene started quickly to come together, and I sketched a woman’s face, eyes nose, mouth…and then, her shoulders and torso, and then…sketched the outlines of a face of a man… his shoulders, chest, and torso…and soon —

I realized that I had drawn a pretty detailed rendition of a young man with long hair and a goatee, lying with his head resting casually in the woman’s lap. The woman is looking downward, smiling at him, and her hand rests lightly on his bare chest.  He is looking up at her, with a playful grin, and he is winking at her.

I could hardly believe that the sketch came together so quickly, so smoothly, with so few erasures/corrections — all within about twenty minutes of first putting pencil to paper.

(If I had sat down with the focused intent to draw such a scene, my usual attempts would be made slowly, carefully, and fraught with erasures as I stress over perfecting the jawline, or re-drawing the nose for the third time, or what-have-you, and that whole process would usually take me hours.)

So you might imagine how surreal it felt to suddenly find myself drawing …

And everything

— their facial expressions, the positions of their bodies —

just seemed to flow effortlessly from the pencil to the paper, almost without stopping, and entirely without much intent on my part

within the span of 20 minutes.

~~~

Later on, while making dinner, I was talking to an artist friend of mine, and he asked me how my sketching had been going.

I excitedly mentioned how easy things had been that day while I was sketching, and he remarked that it seemed supernatural compared to my usual anxious plod-through.

Hey, d’you think that it means this thing was divinely inspired? I laughed.

I dunno, but I love it when sketching’s like that, he responded.  It may not be divine, but it sure is magic.

Indeed.

~~~

Hail Loki ❤