30 paintings in 30 days, American Samoa, Day 15

Bus and Driver. 

Aiga buses in American Samoa are mostly home made and all wildly colorful. Aiga means "family" and the driver's often own their buses, which is why they all quit and go home at dinner time. 

Joel who used to live in American Samoa and now lives in Delhi, India wrote and asked;

“When I draw people, how do I make them look real?”

Nothing will make you more frustrated than trying to draw people. Part of the problem is because we have learned to 'read' expressions so well. We instinctively look at faces to register what someone is feeling and we gauge our reactions to them. Our eyes can register a 1/64” change in an expression on a face and we remember what it means. It must be a survival mechanism or the desire to know if we are cared for, but we all do it. So getting a face right in a drawing is a complicated problem.    

      Working from live models is difficult since it is boring for the subject to sit for a long time. It could be why many portraits from history look so grim; the subjects had to sit still for hours on end with a blank expression. I used to think people in the past had no fun just from those old serious paintings. Capturing a fleeting expression like joy, surprise or flirtation and making it look natural is extremely hard to do with a camera, much less a pencil. But I’ve only answered how hard it is, not how you actually do it.

     You have to train your hand to draw what your eye sees, not what you think you see. The book “Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain” by Betty Edwards explains the way our minds work. The book offers lessons in how to see and draw effortlessly using the part of our mind that trusts our hands. If you are looking at a chair and thinking “that is a chair, I can draw that” you are not in the right part of your mind to draw. Language is in another part of our brain. So we have to forget words and for lack of a better way to say it “just space out”. Concentrate on seeing the geometric shapes that define the lines of a chair. But if you’re still thinking, “I’ll draw that square first and then a triangle”, you haven’t spaced out enough. Some people acquire this skill early, but anyone can learn it anytime. It is difficult to get any 3D image to read on a flat piece of paper, but faces are the hardest because we know them so well. You can fudge on a flower, but not on a face if you are hoping to make them look like that person. 

     Start with really soft pencils and use cheap paper like newsprint since you’ll need lots of it. You aren’t going to create a masterpiece first time out the gate. That idea will certainly make you frustrated. Relax, have fun, enjoy making a mess like kids do. Actually that’s a good way to start. Get crayons or sidewalk chalk and draw with kids. They go to the creative part of their mind more readily than adults who have a lot of worries. Or you can do what I do and skip this step. I use a digital projector to enlarge photographs onto canvas, then I paint. Some say this is cheating, but whatever. The end result is what matters and my skill is in manipulating paint, not fighting with a pencil.