When I draw pictures I often get lost for hours fantasizing and dreaming to myself about all sorts of imaginary ideas, concepts, stories or worlds, people, creatures and places, magic and illusions. This is often the realm of creative artists, things that don’t exist until you draw them and they are released from the imprisonment of your mined onto an unsuspecting world, it’s amazing when someone looks at your work and says wow.

The creative artists and process.

Below is an image of Gearman, he is an attempt at showing the workings of how creative artists with their imagination create illusions from everyday objects something I have done many times when drawing because you can often see things in other things.

Image showing the constructional stages of building an image from another different image.

Yes I know this is not a creative drawing as such but is it because it is not a photograph either except for the LX mountain bike gears the rest could be considered a digital drawing rather than a pencil drawing but in this format it more easily shows the process of seeing things as other things.

If you draw pictures, any pictures, out of you imagination, from a picture or from life and you look at what you are doing you will start to see other things, this is not likely to happen at first because you will need to build up visual memory from doing a stock of past works, this is often called a repertoire. This is why it is important to practice by doing drawings all the time but if you like drawing like many people do and you are a creative artist it will not be a problem as you will soon have a repertoire.

I want to tell you a little story, it is a bit of a dark story but a true story all the same and also a good reason for understanding a little bit more about what I am trying to explain about visual memory and creative artists.

I had a bit of an obsession from when I was a small child, I wanted to be able to draw the human likeness, I wanted to be able to draw portraits of real people that looked like them. A large part of my young life had been focused on trying to do this accurately, so as others would uphold my observations and confirm that I had the ability to capture the human likeness through drawing. I eventually reached the pinnacle of my success in this by drawing and painting portraits for people, getting paid by them for this work. During this time of about 3 years doing portraits I sold over a hundred of these to the expressed wishes of those I was drawing them for but I also drew many more in the process that I also sold, how many I do not really know but in total a couple of hundred. I was at it all the time but it was causing me other problems I discovered, I was so over exposed to faces that I began to start seeing them everywhere, in everything I looked at. I seen faces in trees, bushes, the drawings I was doing, buildings, everything, it was fun at first but it soon became annoying for me because I felt it was restricting my imagination unless I was drawing faces.

I never wanted to be like that, I wanted to be able to draw faces as well as cars, robots, landscapes, mountain bikescapes or what ever but not just faces and I had to stop.

I am glad I did, I don’t just see faces in everything I look at anymore but the only way to do this was to stop and go back to drawing anything but not faces, only when I need them for something else now.

This leads me to believe that all creative artists can hone their skills into a focused but restricted visual memory by repetitively doing the same subjects over and over, it seems to be a reason why some of these creative artists can draw from memory without even looking, which is something I did not like because it felt like my creative abilities where being restricted to only one type of subject.

My new obsession is to be able to draw everything and I am joking because I can do that anyway so that’s what I do, we are all creative artists developing a creative process in every thing we do because that’s what humans do when they focus their attentions on a task this dose not just apply to drawing.