In my previous 2 posts, On Being Mindful & On Learning to Draw, I mentioned the importance of drawing new lines before erasing old ones. In this post, let’s look at why this is a good – in fact, essential – drawing habit to practice.
Imagine this scenario: You are in the far corner of a room, endeavoring to exit. Setting your sights on the doorway, you take several steps in its direction when you encounter a chair blocking your path. Do you turn around & walk back to your original starting point, alter your trajectory to account for the chair, & then set out again? Or do you stay where you are, take a few steps either to the right or to the left to avoid the chair, & then continue on your way?
Now let’s say you are engaged in drawing a still life. (In the above analogy, this is equivalent to trying to reach the door on the other side of the room.) After drawing for a bit, you realize you have to change some lines in order to advance your drawing. (In other words, you just bumped into the chair!) You follow our good drawing habit by first deciding where the new lines should be, then drawing them. You are now free to erase the old, unwanted lines. (In our analogy, you took a few steps around the chair & continued on your way.) Notice that this required you to make a decision about where the new lines should go before erasing the old ones. (“Do I go left or do I go right to get around the chair?”) To put it another way, you made your new lines in relation to the old ones. (In our analogy, you figured out that the best way around the chair was to go, say, left based on where you were when you bumped into it.) Vital point to note: You did not start all over again, which happens when you erase the unwanted lines first. (You did not go back to the other side of the room & start your journey over again.)
OK, let’s add a new wrinkle: Say you realize you need to change some lines because your drawing doesn’t look right, but you are not sure how to proceed; you don’t know where the new lines should go. (“I really don’t know how to get around that blasted chair!”) In that case, make no changes because you are about to enter that truly unhappy state called confusion. Confusion sets in when you know something is wrong with your drawing, but you haven’t a clue as to what it is, so there’s no way to fix it.
This is typically the time when you are very tempted to start erasing all offending lines. The urge to get them off the paper NOW is overwhelming! I often think this is a throwback to school when we hurriedly eradicated all evidence of our perceived ignorance, practically putting a hole in our paper in our zeal to get rid of the incorrect math answer or the misspelled word.
But drawing is neither math nor spelling. When confusion sets in, remember this: Drawing is a process. We move toward our finished drawing instead of accomplishing it in one fell swoop. We build it gradually. We make it better & better, by closely observing, by continually establishing relationships among the various elements, by sighting & aligning…& by talking aloud to ourselves, whenever necessary. And we recognize that the lines that we see as “wrong” now were actually “right” earlier in the process; they are only “wrong” now because our drawing is advancing to the next stage. Earlier, those “wrong” lines served the purpose of moving our drawing further along & now we encourage them to evolve into the new lines that will advance our drawing yet again. To erase them before this happens is to deny they were ever there, & when we do that, we lose the value of the part they played in helping us to achieve our goal of a finished drawing.