What is drawing? What is painting? How are they different? How are they alike? How can one help improve your creativity of the other? We wrestle with these questions and realize how similar drawing and painting really are, especially to the emerging artist that depends heavily on them both.
Of course we use sketches and drawings as a preamble to our paintings, sometimes. In this example, I am using a drawing abstracted from Nature, with oil pastels, to enhance my color sense. By layering the oil pastels, I achieve more meaningful and sophistacted colors. I spend a lot of time layering the pastels.
Then when I paint the image, each attempt to reach the color by mixing my oil paints requires taking more time than I have in the past to carefully mix and try to match to my pastel drawing. I am slowing down, being more patient. I am looking more. I am feeling my way toward the complex color.
This was a breakthrough exercise for me and pointed out my colors are too simple; too much like “out of the tube”. They are too easily recognized when I do not care to have them be recognized. I want the complexity that Nature brings to color: vibrant and dull, transparent and opaque qualities with indirect ways too achieve the color, i.e. not a straightforward mixture from a spin of a student’s color wheel.
What else about my painting can I learn from drawing?