Bad Drawing and Collecting Life Reference
"...You should strive for a release from the live-action-ness of the model and extract from it, not what it is, but what it is doing..."
Walt Stanchfield, Gesture Drawing for Animation, Chapter 6: Pushing the Gesture
I've heard that the first part of dealing with an addiction is admitting to it.
Hi. My name is Mandy Rose. I am addicted to sketchbooks I never use, art supplies I use even less, drawing and writing books, and most of all, figure drawing reference.
Maybe you laugh. I assure you, this is not an exaggeration.
I haunt Art Station, checking faithfully every morning (sometimes several times a day if I'm bored) for new packs that look interesting, things I might want in the future, and the holy grail of all of it, the 70% off sale that occurs several times a year. Over the past decade I've collected so many references that I'm going to need an external hard drive to store them all in the very very near future, sooner if I continue the way I've been going lately.
I don't know why I do this. Maybe I'm the undiagnosed neurodivergent I've been told I am. I think there's something about the human figure that fascinates me endlessly. If I never drew anything but people ever again, I would never be bored. And every time I get a new reference pack, the potential of what I can do with it in the future and what I can draw makes me giddy. It's MINE! All MINE!
The irony is that real people terrify me. So my obsession with them is kind of bizzare.
I love exploring the interaction between people and animals. This is an old portfolio piece from my super-realism days.
Now, only a few years later, I'm doing this.
My obsession isn't shocking, really. My artist "idols" growing up were Vermeer, Norman Rockwell, Arthur Rackham and Alphonse Mucha. I've recently discovered Eugen von Blas and the pre-Raphaelites. People in pictures don't scare me. They don't have strange rules that I'm constantly running through without realizing. I'm not awkward around them. They don't say and do things that confuse me; they don't get mad when I say something that's perfectly normal in my mind but goes against one (or many) of their unspoken rules, those miserable rules that they all seem to know instinctively somehow, but I can't grasp. People in pictures make SENSE.
Even when they look like this.
Great scott. I think I better go do some more drawing.