The Inner Critic - Art Journey - Help From Gary Gumble

In my last post I went through my whole journey up to my final painting in 2016 before I quit having suffered a grief.  When my lovely dog passed away in October 2016 I could not face painting or drawing or art or anything.  I got rid of all my art and most of my art materials and did not go near it again.  The final thing I had done was to ask Gary Gumble at Beginning Artist for advice on how to improve with my art.  Here is his reply to my letter:

Hello Bernadette,

Thank you very much for your email. Believe me; what you are experiencing is not unique to you. Many beginners struggle with that judgmental voice we all have in our heads. That voice that tries to convince us that what we do must be perfect or it's no good. I've had to fight with that voice many times over the years. I've learned that most of the time that voice is very wrong. It creates limits on what we can accomplish that don't otherwise exist.

You mention that you can copy quite well. That's a great beginning point for art. By learning to copy well you're establishing a good foundation for growing beyond that point.

I would love to give you more specific advice if I could see some of your work. Would you be willing to email me photographs of a few drawings and a few paintings? (Finished or unfinished is fine.)

Best Wishes,

Gary Gumble

Founder of www.beginningartist.com

mailto:gary_g@beginningartist.com

I did send him some of my sketches to look at but right away his immediate insight and pinpointing of the Inner Critic was incredible!  It was so true.  I was really limiting myself, creating restrictions and worrying too much, aiming for perfection.  It really really helped!  Sadly it was not until 1 year later in 2017 that I felt able to reply and perhaps venture along the art journey once more:

Dear Gary,

Thank you so much for getting back to me.  I found your email buried amongst other emails from a long time ago and I have been meaning to write back.   Many things happened after I wrote to you and I found myself abandoning art.  I still enjoy your newsletter emails but I have not personally continued with any artwork for almost a year now.  I keep wishing to and I have a journal where I copy various passages of texts and things and I occasionally like to draw in something but as I said before, unless I copy, I cannot seem to do anything.

 

As suggested, I am attaching some pictures of some of the artwork I have done in the past.  What I wish to do is to be able to draw, I like pencils, but when I think and hover over the page, I literally cannot do anything unless it is a 2D childish drawing.  It's different if I copy though.  It seems strange.  I see peoples examples of their notebooks and things, with thoughts or ideas or even a collection of drawings but I don't know how to go about that kind of thing. I hope that makes sense and that you can give me some tips.I am attaching some sketches.  I went through a tutorial book and these are a few of the exercises.  The gramophone I copied off of a random image from Google Images and was pleased with.

 

Best Wishes and thanks

Bernadette 

The images I sent were of the first sketches and the gramophone that appear on this blog in my first posts.  I am including his correspondence as it's just remarkable:

Hi Bernadette,

 

I was pleased to see your drawings and sorry to hear you have stopped doing them, even though you say you keep wishing to start. My impression from looking at your drawings and from what you said in your email is that you are expecting way too much of yourself for the stage you are at. That perfectionism, which I can recognize because it is part of me as well, can be self-defeating. It becomes a Catch 22. You are unable to meet your too-high expectations because you aren't experienced enough yet. And you can't become experienced enough because the critic in your mind tells you that you can never reach the lofty expectations it sets.

 

Well, speaking as an experienced artist who has had to deal with his own inner critic, I don't find your drawings "childish" at all. Do some of them show inexperience? Of course they do. You are inexperienced. But some also show a good eye for shape and proportion. The purse, the fruit and especially the gramophone are drawn very well. Doing simple line drawings doesn't mean they are childish. They would only look childish if the shapes and proportions were way off.

 

Gramophone copied from Google Images

I was especially impressed with the gramophone. What immediately caught my eye was how well you drew the speaker part of this device. The ellipse formed by the flared end of it is very well done. So is the inside of speaker cone. These are things that usually trip up beginning artists.

 

Another sign of that damn inner critic is when you say all you can do is copy. Well, copying is where everyone starts, me included. You have no right to compare your efforts to people who have much more experience doing journals and sketchbooks. More creativity in what you do comes with experience.

 

You copy. As you begin to feel more in control of the medium you are using, you become more confident and more willing to "color outside the lines", so to speak. You become more willing to experiment and see what happens. Gradually you become more and more creative….and you learn to ignore the inner critic.

 

But first you need to allow drawing to just be fun. No more expectations or intentions than that. If your mind starts ranting that something you've drawn "should be" better or "should be" this or "should be" that, that is your self-defeating inner critic talking. The main thing drawing "should be" is fun.

 

So, my conclusion is that your drawings already show that you have the ability to learn to draw well. The only question in my mind is will you begin to do that or will you let your inner critic continue to defeat you?

 

Here's hoping you choose the first option.

 

Gary Gumble

Founder of www.beginningartist.com

The best part of the correspondence in the following weeks and kind of summary or mantra I like is to keep it fun.  Gary sent the follow reply and the final sentence is so worth holding onto and really made me laugh: 

I'm pleased to hear that I was of some help to you. And I am pleased to hear you are sketching again. The really important thing is to keep it fun and keep a careful watch out for when that critic tries to sneak back into your thoughts with negativity. Resist!

 

Say, "Thank you for sharing, but I'm going to ignore you."

Drawing Using My Own Initiative and Different Mediums

For my first artistic venturing into something of my own initiative I used Google Images to find something new to copy.  I was so used to copying the tutorials and did not feel 100% ready to make something up from nothing that I found a nice cake image and copied that:

A cake from Google Images

I was pleased with the cake, I wanted to leave it plain and just shade it as I love pencil shading so much, but I filled it in with coloured pencils.  After this I found a mug 'in the flesh' and copied that from real life:

A mug from real life

After this I decided I would start to try out a range of mediums. 

OIL PASTELS:

I drew a nice blu-tit using cheap oil pastels, I believe I coped this quickly from a Christmas card:

My biggest triumph was to take a bunch of bananas from the kitchen and draw it with the oil pastels.  It actually didn't take long at all and turned out very well.  I was really pleased at having transcribed it from 'the flesh' onto paper:

Oil Pastel Bananas from Still Life.

ACRYLICS:

At this time I really got creative and started to try all sorts of mediums.  This flower I started with acrylic but I didn't really finish it:

This Parrot was an interesting exercise in using acrylic with a different style. This was done using canvas paper:

And then I really decided to try something really different using inspiration from reference pictures found on the internet and try my own picture using canvas paper and acrylic.  I drew an interesting sun and grass using different shades of yellows and oranges and let it dry.

Reference pic:

Reference Pic that I found I liked

Stage 1 painting

Stage 2 painting

And then I added some dark spooky trees:

Stage 3 Painting.

 These were interesting results.  I stopped at this point. There are some other exercises I did with acrylics into a scrap book, lots of small paintings daily as exercises that I thoroughly enjoyed but I don't have any of my old art as I got rid of it all when I quit the first time.  I really fell in love with acrylic paint but it was quite an ordeal.  Oil pastels I found harder, I needed several stumps for blending but they were a real achievements.  I did a couple of 'proper' oil pastel pictures from a technical book, a sunset over a city and a huge vase of flowers.  They were a good learning curve.  I did not finish the vast of flowers:

Vase of flowers in expensive oil pastels using rag paper and an art board.

The above vase of flowers in oil pastels was really fun to work on.  I enjoyed the pencil sketch of it and then filling it in with the oil pastels.  I have to admit I got into the art materials and forked out on some really good oil pastels for £60 and they were great to work with.  I never finished this.

CAMEL OIL PASTELS

Even though I had these expensive oil pastels I found on You Tube all these tutorial videos for art with CAMEL oil pastels from India.  The pictures were awesome!!  At first I attempted one with my own pastels:

Again, I never finished this but was getting to grips with the idea of perspective.  I had gone at this stage from not being able to draw anything, to shading and now pictures that had some sort of depth!  I decided that because the tutorial videos reference specific camel shades I would get some camel oil pastels and use them.  They were only £11. After this I attempted another one, again incomplete but better:

It was so much more fun with the camel pastels because they told you the exact colours.  The shading was working and the trees actually looked like they were in the distance!  I decided that I really like oil pastels, it was time to try soft pastels.

SOFT PASTELS

My first attempt with soft pastels I was feeling quite enthusiastic and confident so I thought about what I would like to draw, the things I like and I thought - I like standing stones.  I looked for some reference pictures and found some images of standing stones.  What I did at this point, I did not copy the picture identically, I instead moved the stones about and changed things up, added stones from other pictures.  I only have left some images of the finished result, I loved it.  I don't have it anymore though.   Below are the reference photos I used:

And here is my original drawing in soft pastels, the first time I had used soft pastels:

At the end I sprayed the picture with a fixture.  My favourite bit was the shadows:

Drawing what I like seemed to really work and it was after this that I drew several pictures of lighthouses.  I found that the soft pastels made me wheeze unfortunately, I had not long had lung problems and did not wish to aggravate it so did not use them anymore after that.  I don't think I used the oil pastels for a while either but went back to acrylics.  This became my "LIGHTHOUSE" phase where I decided to paint one lighthouse after another.  Sadly, I don't have any photos of the lighthouses I did, just one on a canvas that I copied from Google:

My acrylic Lighthouse copy

I considered this my first success, I was able to use the paint carefully especially at the top and got the shading under the roof too.  Very pleased with this.  I no longer have it after my "quitting" cull as I said, my dog passed away in 2016 and I threw everything and quit, I did not want things reminding me of the atmospheres of those times or the past, it was such a difficult time.  It's sad because after the above lighthouse and several different ones, after that whole journey of shading, different mediums, tutorials, practise, understanding, I took the plunge and began a picture that truly represented me as a budding new artist.  I drew a lighthouse from our local area - Shoreham, but I made it my own.  I made my own horizon, clouds, rocks, I chose where the lighthouse would be and I spent weeks on the individual bricks and shading.  I put the lighthouse at the left of the picture.  I never finished it and I no longer have it, I don't have any photos of it but I do have the reference pictures and reference paintings I used to make my own.  This was the last painting I did before quitting.

I think it's important to paint what you know and what you like.  As a music composer, I found my own style of writing by drawing upon my favourite styles and favourite instruments.  I can now do this easily (you can see more in my music blog).  With art, it took me 2 years on and off and trying out loads of different mediums and areas.  All of the above took place from about 2014-2016.  I then wrote to Gary Gumble for advice on how to go further with my art - the following is the email I wrote in 2016 just when I was painting my final lighthouse and just before my beloved dog passed away.  In addition to various books there is so much help on the internet and I found Gary Gumble's newsletters very inspiring and easy to understand.  You can check out his website here https://www.beginningartist.com/:

Dear Mr Gumble.

I am writing because I subscribed to your emails a while ago after reading some of your blogs on your website.  It was very inspiring and practical.  You mentioned you wanted to hear from your subscribers and I thought I would write.  I have been meaning to get round to it for ages. 

At the time, I was teaching myself to draw.  I seem to pick up 'how to draw' books and do the courses but feel no further.  I cannot take the leap to do something from my imagination.  The thing is, I can copy quite well but I do have this opinion of myself that I just cannot do it, so I reach for the beginners tutorials over and over again.

I have taken to painting lighthouses, I copied 2 pictures then I found a photograph of a local lighthouse of ours and followed your advice to make it my own.  I put the lighthouse to the side and had 3 hot air balloons coming in to land, they added nice colour.  I have yet to finish this picture.  I found this newsletter very interesting, particularly the 'why' question.  I haven't picked it up again, I cannot seem to get inspired and it's mostly because of 'why?'.  There are so many other things to do it seems and the pictures come last, I don't seem to know why. 

Anyway, thank you for your newsletters, they are very inspiring.

Best Wishes

Bernadette