I’ve played with blind drawings from time to time. Sometimes out of boredom, some for “warming up,” and other times to just get out of my head.
It’s the exercise where you either look at something and draw it without looking down at the paper/canvas — or you can just close your eyes and draw completely from your own tactile / spacial relations sense.
Sometimes it’s just a gas to look at where things end up. At times, it’s absolutely awful. But sometimes it’s just beautiful.
Call my an eye of the beholder guy but I’m extremely open to what “art” is “supposed to” look like.
Tonight, I was toying with this style and broke my canvas up into smaller quadrants. At top, I used the shape tool to play at making body parts. Each came out fairly cool-looking to me.
So then I decided to play further and recreate each of those drawings with just lines AND without looking back at the original. (also partly thinking back on what I had in my mind when first drawing) And I liked how those came out as well.
As I start a new year in a new sketch book, it was funny to look back at just the mere quantity of sketches I’ve had in each of the last few years’ books.
2019: 360 pages
2020: 681
2021: 803
What’s remarkable is, I recall those first years culling or deleting sketches as I went through the months. I still now will trash a sketch if it is just not usable in any sense. But, I think the numbers are showing me slowly finding an appreciation for my process more than the result. And wanting to watch that, even if they never leave the sketch book.
2022 so far has 14 pages in 4 days. Here’s to making so many more wonderful messes!
* * First round of prints went out to the post office, so there will be some of “my art 📥(in) your mail”(box, IRL) possibly today!
Jump in on the fun, go ahead and subscribe (and message me your address!) for the paid version of this substack here:
Happy new year, friends!
— Ernio