Grasping

I've got to draw something, I've really got to draw something. I fear I'll forget how to hold a pencil properly if I don't get my head down and draw something!

The hurdle I must now cross is what do I draw? My concentration has been shot to pieces lately, as I'm sure I've mentioned, and I'm just finding it more and more difficult to dedicate a few hours to a single drawing. When I look back at the books, folders, and piles of old drawings that I've done, they were much more numerous a few years ago than they are now. What changed between then and now?

I don't think that I have a problem with the quality of my artwork. I know that it's far from the best, or even close, but that's fine. There are webcomic artists out there who churn out page after page of fairly basic illustration. I'm not saying that the artists cannot draw well, but the majority does not allow perfectionism get in the way of just putting pen to paper and sketching.

When I am bored at work (read: most of the time), I think to myself that my time would be better spend drawing something. I don't go for the nearest sketchpad and set of pencils, of course, because I'm at work.

If the same thought process goes through my mind at home, then I'll often grab a pad, some pencils, and sit down to stare at the blank sheet of paper for about half an hour before putting it all away. Nothing comes to me. There is nothing in my head to translate onto paper.

The same sort of thing happens with writing, only I find it infinitely more difficult to pull up whatever flavour of word processor I'm using to stare at it for the next fifteen-to-thirty minutes. If I start a story or what-have-you, I can rarely finish it. If I need more than one session of sitting down and writing to finish a story, then ninety-nine times out of one-hundred, the story will get binned because I cannot regain the momentum I had when I originally began.

This isn't quite the definition of starving artist unless you could say I'm starving for inspiration. Not so much an artist as someone who occasionally comes up with a fairly good drawing. Even if I see, or think of, something that inspires me, I cannot find a way to faithfully translate it to paper. The photographs that I took at the weekend of the woods near the Darwell Reservoir, for example, are pretty enough; but they do not tell you how it felt to be there. You don't get to step back, turn your head, and see everything. It's a limited perspective.

So, perhaps, I'm contradicting myself and some level of perfectionism is in my way. But there is still the obstacle of inspiration: a subject for me to draw.