I’m A Shy Artist

I’m not sure if my shyness comes through in my writing. I hope it doesn’t because I don’t feel shy when I write. My shyness has gotten in my way a lot. For example, I can’t put my work in galleries because I’d have to deal too directly with people to do that. Currently, I keep all my work in a box. When I wrote my book, all communication was done via email. It was a shy person’s dream job in many ways, but for many reasons, there was to be only one book.

These posts are important because they let me talk about and show my work. And I find it centers me when I share the ups and downs of creating my art. So, thank you for being there to receive them. You are very much appreciated.

I’ve been running outside between rain storms to take pictures of these grape leaves. I like how the leaves look in the overcast lighting right before a rainstorm, but I don’t want to draw the rain drops on them. After several storms, I finally got a shot I liked enough to draw. I’m drawing these leaves before they change color, although they will have changed color by the time I post this since I draw so slowly.

You might be shocked that I’m not drawing redbud leaves as I do usually. After the big forced yard clean-up of the summer, it’s easier to see the other foliage that is equally as beautiful as the beloved redbud leaves. And the yard isn’t really as naked as I thought it would be. There’s plenty of foliage left for me to draw, really there is.

I’m using my old favorites Arches hot press watercolor paper and Staedtler Mars Lumograph pencils for this drawing.

After I took off my glasses and got my first near-sighted close-up look at this photo, I noticed that nearly every leaf is encircled by and detailed with thin white lines. The lines are the edges of the leaves and their veins. They can be seen because of the angle of the leaves and the lighting. When I complained about how challenging all these tiny lines would be to draw to my husband, however, he suggested it was a karma problem. I suspect he’s right.

I’m creating the thin white lines by drawing around them and leaving the paper white, or by erasing them with my Tombow Mono Zero eraser that I have sharpened into a point. Then I retouch them with a sharp lead.

As you know, I trace the outline of the photo onto my drawing paper. I do that because it’s quicker than drawing by eye and lets me get on to the fun of shading sooner. This tracing turned out to be a bit of a mess, so I’m spending a lot of time redrawing it. After all these years, I still haven’t figured out which lines to include and which ones to leave out, so I ended up with a tangle of lines to sort out again.

Today, after drawing a leaf with many tiny white lines, I heard an inner voice whisper ‘beautiful,’ which shocked me because I don’t compliment myself! I guess my inner critic took the day off and this bit of encouragement bubbled to the surface from some hidden well of self-love. Or maybe I was confirming my love of grayscale, which I find magical because it lifts away a layer of reality and lets us peer into the soul of the thing.

The very bright leaf at the top right of the drawing was glowing in life, and I want to capture that brightness but still have visible detail. That’s a difficult tightrope to walk because the more detail I add, the darker the value range tends to become.

I lightened some details that became too dark on that top right leaf by tapping them gently with my rubber wedge tool. This tool is meant for shaping clay, but it’s made of rubber and lifts graphite gently. I buy these on Ebay in a five tool set that comes from China. (These rubber tools are being replaced by silicone, though, and the silicone tools tend to smear the graphite rather than lift it.)

How do you make a leaf glow? Maybe with a wand and an enchantment. All I have are pencils and erasers, so I just lightened the leaf’s highlights as much as I could so that it contrasts with the darker leaves around it. Although the leaf is not really glowing, it’s light enough that I’m satisfied with it.

I’m finally getting into the rhythm of drawing the grape leaves. First, I draw the outline of the leaf with the veins lightly outlined also. Then I fill in the value of the leaf while paying attention to where the darker areas pool. It’s simple, but it takes concentration to get the value applied to the right degree with the darker areas gradated evenly.

The leaf drawing process is very meditative, and I often spend an hour or more on a single leaf because there is so much subtle detail. That’s nearly an entire drawing session. I’ve learned over the years that an hour and a half is about all the drawing my  brain can manage in one setting.

I’m drawing the ‘same’ leaves with the same hardness of lead. For example, the background leaves are all shaded with an H pencil. I make a note of the pencils I use along the edge of the drawing on the masking tape. I understand that being this picky is a little neurotic, but some inner unease insists on this consistency.

I drew all the edge leaves in the background before I drew the big middle leaf in this quadrant. I did this because I wanted to have some values to compare the big leaf to when I drew it. However, now I have to try to make the big leaf’s values sync with those background leaf values, so I’ve locked in and limited which values I can use. Damn.

Drawing the big middle leaf is tricky. As it runs from light to middling dark, nearly every sub-section of the leaf has a different set of values, so each part has to be drawn differently.

And now that I’ve drawn the big middle leaf, I see that the background leaves need to be darker. Double damn.

Honestly, sometimes the ‘push me-pull you’ method of drawing is the only way to get to the right values. Artists are not machines. We interpret, we adjust, we whisper a story in light and shadow. So, while I might mumble and cuss under my breath as I redo a section of drawing for the third time, I still love drawing.

This last portion of the drawing is definitely a mess. There are stems, leaves, and tiny little flower buds all crammed together in a mishmash of growing matter. And except for a portion of the central leaf, it’s all rather dark, so it’s going to be taxing to draw.

Since there is so much going on in this area, I took some time to redraw the line drawing with detail in mind. This image shows the line drawing before and after I redrew it. You can see how my original tracing missed most of the details.

Today I drew two tiny leaf and flower bud details that I knew were out of place, but I left them there anyway. This part of the drawing is so tight and confusing that I don’t think it matters if small details are in the wrong spots. So, I reminded myself that I’m a human, not a copy machine, and changing the photo’s composition is allowed.

Nearing the end of this drawing, I realized that the two small wooden plank areas that show through the leaves still looked a little cartoonish compared to the rest of the drawing. So, I touched up their shadows, added a few details, and then I was done.

I’m not too disappointed with this drawing. I couldn’t draw glowing leaves, and my background is too light,  but I did manage to capture a little bit of that ‘before the rain’ lighting/feeling that caught my eye to begin with.

I would have liked the large central leaf to be wider or more open. I think that would have made a better composition, but I accepted what Mother Nature offered me and did the best I could with it.

Thank you again for being there as I stumbled through my anxieties and problems with art making. If you are a shy artist too, please be kind to yourself and work slowly but consistently to build avenues to show your work,  because you and what you offer are important to the world.

Happy drawing everyone,
Carol