My story behind my drawings

I picked up drawing a few years ago.

It started with working with water colors on paper for pleasure, and eventually developed into paintings of places I've been to or abstract paintings, and drawing with pencil and charcoal.

To be clear, I do not know how to draw. As in, I don't have the technical knowledge or the skill. I just draw by feeling and experimenting and usually get my proportions all wrong.

But I actually really enjoy drawing.

The reason being, drawing allows me to look at things around with a perspective that I otherwise do not apply.

In order to create an illustration on paper, I need to observe the world around me from a 2D perspective.

I figured I need to look at things as if they were flat, at the same time, capturing a sense of fullness and life within the image that I must activate in my drawings.

I don't know if that's how trained artists draw. Mostly probably not, but that's been my approach in developing my own technique.

I suppose, I enjoy figuring things out. But that doesn't always result in beautiful things. Here is an example of a painting I drew of the Mediterranean sea in southern France.

It is the lighthouse on the beach of Collioure before sunrise. I drew it from a photograph I took when I was in Collioure in 2014.

After doing some paintings, I decided I needed to learn a bit of drawing. So, I hung around my painter friend Edgar whenever I was in Amsterdam, and practised whenever a moment came up.

Once he took me to one of his professional artists gathering, where a bunch of them get together and practice drawing a live model. The model would change poses every ten minutes, and you've to be quick to draw her.

Here are some drawings I made. They're very very primitive, it's not to show my skill that I'm sharing them, but to clarify what I mean by enjoying figuring things out.

As you can see, my proportions are all messed up, but I tried to capture just the essence of her form using some shading and some rough lines.

2.

Then she went and struck this really hard to draw pose, and I did my best to capture the 3D quality of being upside down, while terribly failing at it. Although, I'm proud of how this picture turned out, because at least I managed to make it look like a person upside down on a chair. (well, almost. But it was really hard, okay?!!)

3.

Then I took a little break because all the figuring out in ten minutes was becoming tiring. So, while the rest of the painters continued their practice, I drew this view from the window of that house. It was easier because it was still and with no time limits.

4.

This is, on the outside a very average drawing. But I really like it because I think it captures the atmosphere of that moment and the pose. It was a comfortable pose, the model looked like a cosy cat on that couch, her hair sort of hanging all over her shoulder, and it really felt like it was flowing all over the room in a sort of a dainty breeze. I think I put my own feeling into this drawing. That was really enjoyable.

5.

This drawing is from another situation altogether. I was sitting in a train to Vienna, and I decided to practice drawing anatomy, so I drew my own hand.

I am happy with the full-hand drawing, but the fingernails close-up drawing sucks, really. When I say sucks, I mean, I couldn't for the life of me figure out a way to get it right. My hand drawing isn't really perfect but I actually managed to learn observing certain details which I'd never noticed before. It is quite close to my real hand.

I suppose I love to draw because I love to discover. I love to see what I'd failed to see before. I love how suddenly a part of my brain lights up and goes like, “oh! Look! The knuckles look actually like this, when you look at it like this!”