What Have You Been Doing Recently?

Since the coronavirus is spreading again, I can’t go out and do anything particularly interesting, but I do have more time to draw. I used to draw a lot when I was studying fine art at university. Sometimes I turned ideas from my drawings into paintings and sculptures. I suppose you could describe my work as surrealism. Famous artists from the surrealist movement are painters like Salvador Dali and Max Ernst, but countless contemporary artists and illustrators make work that can be called ‘surreal’. I like to draw people and animals but not how they appear in life. It’s much more fun to distort them and create something impossible.

Drawing is a good way to relieve stress. I think it is even more relaxing nowadays, as when I draw something, I’m not thinking about trying to produce a perfect piece of artwork to display in exhibitions, I just draw random things for fun, or practice drawing a specific thing.

Recently, I’ve done more figurative drawings from observation. I challenge myself to draw people from the TV. Since the camera cuts a lot and the actors or presenters are in motion, it’s a fun challenge. I have to capture the image quickly and accurately with a few simple lines before gradually adding more detail. I like to draw faces because I can think about the 3-dimensional shapes and angles in the face and how they come together. I like to think about the bone structure underneath and how that affects the light and shadow in the face. It can also be interesting to see the differences in different ages, ethnicities and in men and women. I used to draw other passengers on the Yamanote line secretly in a little notebook, but since most people are wearing masks at the moment, that wouldn’t be as interesting right now. You might think people would feel uncomfortable being drawn by a stranger on the train, but not a single person ever noticed. Everyone was always so wrapped up in their phones, books, or consoles that they never looked my way.

If I want to take my time with my drawings, I sometimes copy from pictures on Instagram. Mostly I draw cats. I tend to draw a variety of breeds, because (like people) cats can have very different types of faces. When I’ve drawn a few examples of a breed, I like to draw some examples without a reference picture to see if I’ve mastered drawing that breed.

The only drawing project I’ve put serious work and thought into lately has been a comic I made for my partner. It’s just ten pages long but it took forever to finish. Drawing a comic is the ultimate challenge because you have to draw people, backgrounds and all kinds of other specific objects. You have to think about different angles and perspectives and make the characters look lively and active. I’m happy with how the comic turned out. It tells a story about middle-aged versions of my partner and I in the future, sailing around the Atlantic Ocean in a lobster trawler and looking for treasure.

Fi

Vocabulary

surreal (adjective) – very strange or unusual; having the quality of a dream
distort (verb) – twist out of shape; change the natural appearance of
figurative (adjective) – (in terms of artwork) presenting something as it appears in life; realistic
in motion (idiom) – moving; not stationary
middle-aged (adjective) – describing the period between young adulthood and old age (approximately 45- 65 years old)
trawler (noun) – a fishing boat that uses a wide, cone-shaped net