Why I stopped drawing photo

Read carefully haha. I am not saying I stopped drawing. I stopped drawing photos.

I think I mentioned my teachers hate people drawing photos, or drawings that look like photos. I can finally understand why.

You can never develop yourself into an artist if all you want is to make drawings that look like photos. Ever.

There are masters who can draw based on photos too, I know. But like I said, they are masters, and masters already have the personality that can shine through their work. So they can work on the images skillfully without losing themselves. For beginners, it's a nightmare to do so. Let me tell you why.

Type "realistic drawing" on Google and search for images.

Right. These are all drawings. Amazing?

Can you tell whether they are photos or drawings? No. Can you tell they were all made by different artists? No. Do you find anything special about these drawings? No. So what's the point of making them? No, not at all.

You can totally understand art differently. But to me art is something that communicates directly to my heart, not my brain. Just like listening to a great piece of classical music you let it guide your emotions until it hits a certain note, so perfectly, you cry. That's the tear of joy. This is something one cannot explain. But at that brief moment, you understand the composer, you know his feelings, so distinctively that it can't be mistaken to be someone else's. 

To learn art, you learn to express yourself through your lines. Consciously or unconsciously you're giving a piece of yourself in whatever thing you produce. Drawings that look like photos in other words hide all the uniqueness of the artist. Yes it impresses the general public but the work is empty. And the emptiness kills art.   

So what makes a great drawing? It can never be wrong to go back to the Italian masters. 

Leonardo Da Vinci

Michelangelo 

Raphael

These are all very simple sketches. But they are more than enough to show you the sophistication of Leonardo, the power of Michelangelo, and the sensibility of Raphael.

I also happened to find a great resource from the British Museum, showing 60 years of drawings by Michelangelo. Enjoy! :) [ Click here ] 

I hope I can buy the catalog of this exhibition but it seems it's all sold out :-<

Letter from an unknown wo(man)

No I am not in love. Not yet. But a pleasant surprise allowed me to gain a glimpse of it, through the keyhole of the door of love, which is, however, still firmly shut.

I don't know how this dear friend of mine can always find the right thing for me at the right time. He recommended me to read a book called "Letter from an unknown woman" by Stefan Zweig written in 1922 (!) [ This is the book I got ]. It was about a desperate woman who finally found the courage to write a letter to a man whom she loved obsessively right before she took her last breath. She spent her entire life spinning around the man who couldn't even recognize her. A very sad story. You can feel her flaming love through the words, so powerful that it can almost burn you.

I see a little bit of myself in the man, a little bit of myself in the woman. I am spoiled. Spoiled rotten by my parents and a special friend who will be eager to read this post the moment I press "Publish". They are the people who are willing to hear what I am going to say, who care to know what I think of them, but will nevertheless love me all the same.

I feel blessed to be spoiled. But it's a happy sad thing. I am so eager to know what does it feel like to love someone unconditionally. I need a burning passion, not only towards art, towards adventures, but also towards other people, till then my life is complete.

May be I still haven't met the right person, or I still haven't learned how to let my emotions flow. But no I am not cold-hearted. I am sensitive. I am delicate. I know it's all inside me. All I need is a key, or someone who's kind enough to answer the door.

Knock, Knock. Please, let me in.

Awesomeness: look at my teacher's sketch!

My friends often ask me since when I started to draw, and where. Well it was around Oct last year, after my trip to Paris. As I am celebrating my fourth month into the magical world of art, I am telling you something about my awesome art teachers.

They are a lovely artist couple. I met them via a friend of mine who is teaching fine arts in a local university. Last week I told them I am going to Paris again during Easter. I am planning to stay in the museums and draw the beautiful sculptures. My teachers hence decided to give me a crash course on drawing sculptures.

Here is my teacher's sketch showing me the techniques. And it took her only 15 mins.

Look at the lines. THE LINES!! They are dancing on the paper, floating in the air. This is so beautiful I am still admiring it as I am writing this entry.

If it feels familiar to you too, now look at this sketch by Raphael 500 years ago. 

The lines...THE LINES!!

\(*0*)/

A small twist - the very nerdy Woody Allen

So here is my latest sketch of Woody Allen. Also started with a photo (of course XD ), but I was trying not to make the sketch look too realistic. I was trying to add a little bit of my own interpretation of Woody Allen. What was it? hmmm....I always think...

Woody Allen is the nerdiest of all nerds LOL

The original photo was one that was taken recently (he is now 79), but in my sketch I tried to make him look timeless. No wrinkles, his skin is smooth as a baby, with cute chubby cheeks. As a result you can't really tell how old he is from the drawing. I just want him to look pure intelligent...and nerdy (to me they are synonyms :P)

I am recently obsessed with finding out what represents age. At first I thought it was the texture of the skin. But from this drawing I was proved wrong. This Woody Allen definitely does not look like twenty something. So what makes him look mature with this flawless skin? The emotions? The intelligence? Or something even more subtle?

If you're also wondering, yes thing like this does happen sometimes. The person who draws, is confused by her own drawing haha...O_o

Hmmm a plateau in drawing?

Finished 2 portraits in a row, both of them from a photo by Irving Penn.

Don't get me wrong I still enjoy drawing people a lot. But I am also screaming for something new.

Wish I have the skills I need to visualise the things beyond what I see....

A beautiful book: A beautiful fall

It all started with a Yves Saint Laurent movie that I watched back in early Dec 2014. I wrote about it [Click]. And I drew something like 4-5 Yves Saint Laurent in a row [Click and Click]. Then I bought a book, and it took me nearly 2 months to finally finish reading it....

Well in fact, I think I have spent more time on Google and Wikipedia than on the book itself.

The Beautiful Fall: Fashion, Genius and Glorious Excess in 1970s Paris

[Click here to reach amazon page] because you probably can't get it anywhere in Hong Kong

It was not a huge book (around 400 pages). The kindle version is selling for only USD 11.99. Considering the author spent 5.5 years running around the world interviewing some 130 celebrities, this book certainly worth your time and money. As a matter of fact, this is actually the only book that I read EVERY SINGLE WORD from forward to epilogue, even the appendix and thank you notes. I think I don't really need to tell you how much I love this book.

But beware. You need to enjoy the book with an open mind. You need to be completely open about people being gay, about people taking drugs, people acting completely reckless, living in ecstasy and ready to burn themselves alive. It's a brutally honest book about youth, about how the most beautiful people turned into sad, old and lonely souls. How talents turned into sorrow, fantasy turned into depression. The first half of the book takes you to the wonderland of Paris in the 1970s, "the glorious excess". Then the second half of the book kicks you back to the reality, where you can almost see with your eyes how exactly these "beautiful" people "fall".

I'd call it a very sad book despite it is all about the most glamorous people on the planet. Life is cruel and whatever happened to these people will happen to me and you, too. You'd see a little bit of yourself from everyone. You can be a kid who refused to grow up. You can be a successful person who stuck in your past. You can be completely clueless. You can be striving hard. No matter how you're living your life, time flies. The sands in the hourglass will keep slipping through your fingers. And one day, you will wake up and wonder how your hair turned grey.

There are a lot of quotes that I'd love to share from this book. But I have chosen these 2 by Yves Saint Laurent, both in his later years. It perfectly resonates with the emptiness that the beautiful book left me:

****

"People think decadence is debauched. 

Decadence is simply something very beautiful that is dying. 

It's a beautiful flower that is dying 

and sometimes you have to wait a very long time for another flower to come along."

****

"The magnificent and pitiful family of the hypersensitive are the salt of the earth. 

I, without knowing it, was a part of that family. It is my own. 

I did not choose this tragic descent, 

but through it I was able to rise to the heavens of creativity, 

where I come across the fire-makers that Rimbaud spoke of, 

discovering myself and understanding that the most important encounter in one's life 

is that with oneself."

*I don't belong to the hypersensitive family...do I??

Je suis Charlie. Nous sommes Charlie.

Sorry if it's a little too scary. But it was indeed scary.

The victims are now forever separated from their families. What have they done wrong? What harm did they do?

I am Charlie. We all are Charlie. We say what we have to say.

My heart is with Paris, my favourite city in the world.