'Drawing makes you live longer' Darren Raven 19.01.09

The workshop with Darren was very thought provoking and challenged my preconceptions about what makes a 'good' drawing. He really did say drawing makes you live longer! I think I need to practice a little more before I get that amount of satisfaction from it! We learnt to never look at the paper because why would you need to? My first drawing of the corkscrew was using my usual method that everyone uses, looking at the corkscrew, looking at where your pencil is and looking at what your hand is creating on the paper. So you get sucked in to wanting the picture to look real so you spend the majority of the time not even looking at the object. Which seems silly when you think about it because if you wanted an exact replica image you'd just take a photo right!? The following drawings were using my left hand/both hands/scissors to cut out the shapes.. which are way more expressive and have more energy about them. You learn the curves, twists, lengths of the object because you spend the hole time concentrating on that- not the paper. In the space of 2 hours my coordination of scale of the corkscrew to what my hand is creating improved. So I imagine if you practiced this method well, you'd start to be able to naturally judge where to take the pencil to give a realistic image, and therefore never look at paper again! That would be a cool skill.. I'll see how it goes..