New Figures, Old Injuries

Somehow, I managed to re-injure myself after my neck trauma from a week or two ago, which meant a weekend of lying around on my back in a lot of pain again. I don’t like pain. I don’t like being inactive. So the minute I managed to get to the chiropractor and start healing, it was back to the drawing board. Fueled by the anxiety of not being able to draw for two days in the midst of a ton of deadlines, I’ve been churning through things like crazy. Sometimes I feel like it’s never enough, but there’s light at the end of the tunnel. In the meantime, here’s some figure drawing.

For figure drawing this week, I picked up one of those Pentel pigment pens at the art store because I hadn’t had time to go home and get my regular supplies. I’m not going to lie, I really struggled this session. My figures felt lifeless and poorly planned, painting with the brush was tricky, I invariably used too much ink, I couldn’t get the essence of the model on the page. But I pushed on, and by the end of it I’d done two pieces I was actually quite proud of. I debated putting them up here in isolation, but I want to own up to the days when I’m just not feeling it, so here’s the whole bunch.

This is a pattern I experience time and time again (feeling like my work is rubbish, drawing anyway, getting through it, and arriving at a place of excitement and inspiration), and the more it happens, the more I can say “I know you think this horrible now, but just keep drawing.” It doesn’t make the despair of the earlier stages less horrible, but practice teaches me that it’s just a phase. Hopefully one day it’ll be gone altogether, but given that I hear about it from just about every artist I admire, I don’t have my hopes too high. And that’s okay.