Trust in your pencil.

This will explain it all.



On this blog (http://printpattern.blogspot.com/) which is delicious btw) I saw this book. It made me fall in love with drawing and just doodling all over again. On alot of my past LO's i've doodled words, piccies and my dots. I guess it is one of the ONLY things I learnt at school and I used. Thank you Mr.Elliott for teaching me to love art and realise we are able to suceed with abit of practise. He was an inspirational teacher for me because at home, no one had an artistic bone in there body. And it wasn't for the want of trying either. My mum used to try to do creative stuff and often used to end up in rather a 'bodge'; apart from her sewing cause she was a mean sew-er. She tried knitting (even with a machine) which failed... and heaps of other stuff. None of which she was much good at. But sewing. I can sew but not in any way as good as her or her mother. Anyhow, i've gone off the point. Mr. Elliott. He was fantastic. A rather large happy man, rather like a ginger Santa Claus, excpet maybe not so old. And he was always emphasizing during my design and technology lessons that we had to practise. We must have gone over colouring pencils, shading and pencil sketches a million or even a trillion times. But you know what, after all this practise I really could see how much better I had got. The whole project that my GCSE rested on got me an A, which I was seriously proud of and so was he. I remember results day, him being there and actually shaking my hand and telling me he knew all along I could do it. The GCSE didn't really confirm how I could do this, it was him. That moment, he confirmed that I was ok, not a 'bodge' at this and so I guess scrapping for me is all about preserving my memories AND putting that piece of me in there somewhere. I had lost this, until I saw this book on that fabby blog...



So i've begun to draw out this title. It's the one that inspires me most from those few cute pics. Retro, curly script. Cute little piccie. And in a yummy chocolate brown and orange.
Which brings me round to trust your pencil.
I've had a few peeps ask me about doodling, doing a class... doing it at crop. It's hard to teach. How do you teach someone to draw? Seems to me like asking how long is a piece of string... But i've just had this eureka moment. It's simple. Trust your pencil. Yes, thats it.
If you're copying this type or that picture or whatever, look at what you're copying and not at what you're drawing. Trust that your pencil is doing it for you. (and I don't mean never look at the paper, we've all had a go at those exercises when we end up with our eyes on our nose or completely out of the face) Keep it simple. Break it down and most of all practise and ENJOY it.

And I know this isn't finished I will post a finshed pic later on... It's a work in progress.