Begin with a warm-up

About five years ago I started with ‘one-line drawings’, drawings made with one line. And also drawn blind, without looking at the paper, which was an eye-opener 🙂 A new way for me to draw and let go of perfection. After all, you can 100% assume that the result will not be perfect. On the contrary, it is sometimes hard to see what you actually drew, but the results are often hilarious. And that, I think, is the crux of the matter, by leaving ‘perfection’ for what it is in this way, you get (or re-find) pleasure in making art and the chance of creating a ‘masterpiece’ is many times greater. Making ‘one line drawings’ is a good exercise to relax and start working in a pleasant way, see it as warming up for the ‘real’ work.

A master of creating one-line drawings is Pablo Picasso. He took a complex, realistic example and simplified it into a single unbroken line. These drawings can seem relatively easy to create, but it can be quite a challenge to capture the true essence of the form in just one line. Try it.

It is important to look carefully at what you want to draw. What are the characteristics of the subject, for example what makes a cow a cow?

Everyone perceives visual things differently. So what I think is an important feature may be different compared to what someone else thinks is important. That’s what makes this way of drawing so interesting.

An additional challenge is to make the same drawing with your eyes closed, or at least without looking at the paper you are drawing on. I made a whole series of “Famous Faces” using this technique. I looked for a picture of a famous person on the Internet and drew it by just looking at the picture. Because your eyes move faster than your brain, the results are surprising and often funny. On some drawings, eyes, nose and mouth are in a strange place or even forgotten. Still others are very similar. I always posted the drawings on Facebook and Instagram and with the exception of a few, the people portrayed were often guessed in a short time. This surprised me, but also made me realize that the drawing turned out better than I initially thought. Self-criticism proved unnecessary and making the drawings became a regular part of my day. I ended up calling the series Minus 30. It was meant to be a 100-day project but I only drew 70 portraits. Every day I spent about half an hour on one such drawing. Most of my time was spent coloring with paint.