Warming Up!

It’s cold as fricking heck outside. Let’s talk about how an artist warms up.

When I roll out of bed at 10:30 in the morning (judge me), I make myself a coffee and think about what I want to achieve today. What are the projects actively occupying me. I remind myself of challenging details - horse legs, bird heads - and decide which tutorials to consult, muscle names to look up, google searches to make, references to assemble.

But before all of these things, it is vital to warm up. Not just for a realistic style; for any. If you don’t warm up, things don’t come together. You connect your mind to your hand. I used to think of it as “getting the bad drawings out,” but a more scientific explanation might include something on neurology. After all, the right hand is controlled by the dominant left hemisphere, right? Well . . .

Setting aside the common criticisms of strict left-vs-right hemisphere theories from decades past (though I learned to draw from sight thanks to Betty Edwards!), it is still part of my daily experience that I have “sides” to my mind: There’s the formation of language, diachronic organization, narratization, planning your day when you get up, the inward observer. And there’s also the synchronic, non-verbal me who sees concepts in spaces, drifts off into music and holds several images at once. (That Theo rarely shows up, and needs to be summoned!)

Distilling gesture - without a single verbal thought, feeling the entire form and its internal structures just as much as what needs to be on the page two-dimensionally, feels to me like a cooperation between these otherwise rather separate modes of thought. And it has to happen on the spot when you do 45-second-sketches on line-of-action.com , where I direct all of you who want to gain confidence and build that bridge between intuition and knowledge :) I try to do it every morning for 30-40 minutes. You'll feel the brain fog leaving as you go, it's lovely.

The book that inspired me to write this little bit (plus maybe a few more down the line) contains a suggestion for an experiment on this separation between speech (“left”) and song (“right”). It goes like this:

“First, think of two topics, anything, personal or general, on which you would like to talk for a couple of paragraphs. Now, imagining you are with a friend, speak out loud on one of the topics. Next, imagining you are with a friend, sing out loud on the other topic. Do each for one full minute, demanding of yourself that you keep going. Compare introspectively. Why is the second so much more difficult? Why does the singing crumble into clichés? Or the melody erode into recitative? Why does the topic desert you in midmelody? What is the nature of your efforts to get your song back on the topic? Or rather—and I think this is more the feeling—to get your topic back to the song?” (Jaynes, Julian. The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, p. 528)

I haven’t tried it sober, but I would probably compare the feeling of singing on a topic (what about improvised rap?) to drawing in general. Maybe doing it often will turn a mortal into a poet ;)