Don’t Polish a Turd
In May of 2018, I enrolled in a figure drawing class at UVU. I had enrolled in this class to jump through a hoop so I could be a BFA student and take the class I really wanted to take: Illustrating for Children’s books. One of the first things our instructor Perry Stewart told us was a story of a road trip where he found a unique souvenir: cow dung covered in a high gloss polish. He told us to stop polishing turds.
Instead, he wanted us to spend any time we had left over in a drawing session to check our proportions, our shapes, and our negative spaces to see if our drawings were correct. I was reminded of this on Monday as I sat in a live figure drawing session practicing my drawing. I realize now that what he was trying to say was, don’t render the figure, draw the figure. If I were to talk to my past self, I would say, “Stop worrying about making the drawing look amazing. Don’t add all the shading you see. Just draw the figure and focus on getting the shapes, proportions, and negative spaces correct. Don’t render the drawing. Draw the figure correctly. You are not looking for your style, you are studying how a figure is put together.”
I’m not sure if I would have listened or understood my future self any better than my past self had understood my teacher.
Today I show up at a figure drawing session with one self serving goal: to become better at drawing figures. I love drawing animals for children’s books, but the more I learn, the more I understand that I need to be drawing people doing things.
I heard an agent tell about an artist she represented who only drew animals. Then one day, he sent her a portfolio full of kids. They were beautiful. She asked him what happened. He told her that he had started doing figure drawing once a month and now he could draw people. I need and I want to become more confident in my ability to draw figures.
So every Monday afternoon for a month now, I’ve been attending the figure drawing session about 30 minutes away. I draw for the whole 3 hours. No one there complains about how much they have to draw. Everyone is on task and diligently working. No one stops drawing in a middle of a session to walk around to get inspired by what everyone else is drawing. We are all on task. We are all there to practice seeing and to figure out how to draw the complex shapes in front of us.
I often tell myself to not polish a turd. To spend any time I have left over before the timer rings and the model moves to check proportions, measure distances, drop plumb lines down, measure angles, look at the negative shapes around the body and between the limbs. I don’t have to have a perfect drawing for a portfolio review. If I gain a greater understanding of how to draw the shape of a forearm, a posed hand or a foreshortened thigh, the drawing is successful.
Maybe it is because I don’t have a review hanging over my head so I can relax and focus on learning. Or maybe it is because I have decided that this is the next thing I must learn to be a successful children’s book artist.
