Setting Sail

As the loyal drawingthestones reader you are, you will know that in the two months that this blog has been in existence, I've been fairly unstructured in my approach to drawing and painting. So far, I've been following the whims of my curiosity, mostly sketching the neighbourhood I live in with pen and watercolor. While that's fun and something I want to keep doing, I've also been feeling a desire to zoom out a little bit and think about where this journey is going.

I did not come to artmaking with a very clear picture of exactly where I want to end up: what I want to be able to produce in which kind of medium, etc. I simply started having some fun with acrylic paint last year. Later on, I got inspired by urban sketchers I saw on instagram and the web which is how I got into watercolors.

At this point, I still don't have much of an idea of where I want to get to and what exactly I want to be able to do. I keep seeing art online that impresses and inspires me but I'm not committed to any particular style or medium. I mostly just want to soak up everything I see and build a foundation that allows me to explore on my own.

This feeling, of having enough skill and knowledge to draw on to find new and unique ways to build things is what I enjoy when I write code. I can't wait to see what that kind of creative freedom feels like in a domain like art which is so different from engineering.

It might be trite to say this but while I admire people whose art I like, I don't feel very inspired by the idea of being able to recreate their style. Instead, I want to be able to transfer what I see onto a canvas or sheet of paper and capture something true and essential about the world I perceive.

Returning to practicalities, I signed up for this course at the Royal Drawing School here in Shoreditch. It starts tomorrow and I'm excited and a little nervous but regardless of how it goes, I'll keep you up to date.