When I was looking to find my art style, I drew mainly with my eyes closed. The exercise was to stretch my art muscles, swirling pencils here and there, mixing colors, and wetting papers. Without an end concept in mind, these art sessions started to demonstrate my color palette and the way my wrist would move as I pushed the pencil across the paper.

It took a month of constant experimenting, and then one day, my style was just there. It took 3 simple strokes across the sketch pad and there was my first drawing.

I thought, back then, that this style would last for years. Instead, it has matured, stretched, and expanded itself. The main figures, and the way that my pencil flows, remains the same. It is when I have pushed this style, tried to adapt it to mainstream art definitions, tried to make my drawings have some worth (because I felt they were too simple to be called art), that I have found my style diminish. Although I may have been happy with the end result, I have noticed that the drawings I feel alive with are the ones that are uninhibited by my limits or desires to fit in.

Out of those initial experiments, I have come across a color palette that has, unconsciously, always surrounded me. And yet as I continue to experiment with my art and my life, I have found this color palette to expand, grow, shift in directions and colors I would have steered far, far away from.

Although I sketch interesting poses while I am at art fairs and markets, I supplement my “idea” pad with magazine cut outs. I look for color combinations and interesting human poses (since I don’t have models to rely on, I use these cut outs as reference – and they usually work better than me trying to stand in front of a mirror while I try to awkwardly sketch a pose).

I have finally realized that even though I sketch and create a color palette before I officially start a drawing, I need to stand back once I have started to draw the final piece. No matter how much I have planned for the perfect drawing, sometimes the drawing knows better and I need to diverge from my plan and just take a step back.

A page from my sketchbook

The initial outline of a drawing, along with its designated color palette

The inspiration for “Kicking It”

The starting sketch for “First Kiss”

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 23rd, 2008 at 3:46 am and is filed under Attaining creativity, Inspiration. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.