I completed assignment 3 with the A3 drawing of the view, but I did not perceive that drawing as a finished work or as the endpoint in a series. It rather felt like “another unfinished, moderately successful attempt”. I like about the drawing that it maintained some of the freshness of the early sketches. Areas for improvement are vast, in particular how I depicted the trees.
I thought about doing more drawings of this view and trying to do something more worked out. But I lack confidence and time. So I’ll proceed to part IV, drawing figures, hoping that a completely new topic provides new motivation to continue.
Maybe it’s time for a little reflection where I am now in this course. Technically speaking, I have completed 3 of 5 parts and I have made lots of drawings. Overall I am very dissatisfied with my work for this course. This mainly has to do with the restricted time I have available for coursework. Most of the time I feel very stuck, confused by instructions, uncomfortable because I feel constrained by guidelines that do not seem to correspond to how I’d spontaneously approach a drawing task. I also feel that the course does not give me enough liberty to find my personal way of doing things. I feel in constant conflict between task instructions and how I’d like to do things or what I would select as my topic. And I feel that all the effort results in low quality drawings. It is really frustrating. In particular, I don’t see any progress at all, I just see myself struggling and not able to draw well but being obliged to proceed because otherwise my course time runs out. But if I don’t benefit from what I’m doing and I don’t have pleasure from it, I’m not sure whether it is really worth doing it.
Conclusion is: I really must find my personal way of doing things without constantly feeling bad about every drawing I make. Otherwise I may succeed in completing the course, but personally it’ll get me nowhere. I would like to feel proud and satisfied about my drawings, but so far this has been an extremely rare experience. When I look through the drawings I’ve done so far, I don’t know which ones I might send for course assessment, I think they are terribly weak. With a few exceptions.
I’m not sure whether I’m simply not good at drawing and must accept the fact, or whether it’s more a problem of finding my personal way of drawing. I would want to select topics I like and draw them in a way where I feel that I learn something, each time I draw.
Instead, I feel I’m repeating my errors, without making any progress. Attempting a task, getting nowhere and stopping, then trying the same approach on a different topic, again getting nowhere. I can proceed like this through the course, having done many drawings, but not getting beyond what I was initially able to do. And this is not the way I want to do it! I’m really desperate to find out what I’m doing wrong and how I might make this course a more rewarding experience.