Living Entrepreneurship Blog / The Arts

Drawing and Fear of Failure

By Danielle Krcmar: “I can’t draw a straight line with a ruler” is often the first thing someone will tell me if I tell them that I teach drawing or I’m an artist. For those of you who want to learn drawing a straight line without a ruler, you might enjoy this, but honestly drawing a straight line isn’t really the point of drawing, unless you’re planning on doing a lot of architectural rendering. Drawing can be a great way of helping you see and observe things more carefully, both in terms of what you’re looking at out in the world and what you put down on the page as a drawing… And it can be fun, and frustrating … and fun again, depending on the day or where you are in the time frame of the drawing. It takes willingness to fail, while acknowledging the interesting things that happen along the way. Drawing a figure model from life is a challenge but the very complexity of the anatomy that makes it so hard to draw means that there will be some beautiful, interesting parts of your drawing even if the whole drawing doesn’t come together in some ideal way. So maybe you can’t draw a straight line with a ruler, but maybe you could make an interesting drawing, or have a really beautiful part of a bad drawing, or as you push through some of the challenge you might find yourself in the zone as you work.

The only way to know is if you try. So, if you’d like to try your hand at drawing, I’ll be teaching a single session figure drawing class on February 7th, from 5-7pm in Trim 215, sign up at the Sorenson website or drop in. You’ll need to pay $5 for the model but we take care of all the art supplies, so it’s a pretty great deal.

Hope to see you there.

Danielle Krcmar, Artist-in-Residence at Sorenson Visual Arts Center