Are Drawing Aids Cheating?
Jill has emailed us expressing her concerns that although she has achieved a reasonable success with her art she has not used the pastel pencils before and feels that she may flounder with this new medium. This is an understandable reaction however with the right approach and practice I am sure she will succeed in mastering the medium.
Back to Basics
The way to proceed is to put aside everything you have learned about other mediums and go back to the beginning. First try several of our beginners packs, then watch our videos on YouTube and the members site to familiarise yourself with the way we work the pastel pencils, then put into practice the techniques we demonstrate.
Are we cheating?
Another point Jill raises is she feels that using a drawing aid such as our square drawing method could be regarded as cheating without which she believes it would take a great deal of time to get the proportions right drawing the line drawing in freehand.Let me assure Jill and everyone else reading this blog that a great many professional artists use a drawing aid of one kind or another the difference is you never see them using them.I have proved that using a drawing aid such as our square drawing grid system can in fact train your eyes to understand proportions better and as time goes on you will be able to draw many pictures freehand with more confidence.The only exception to this rule is animal portrait work, even a trained artist can make an error by working freehand and very often this is not seen because there is no way to check the work, with square drawing there is.So are we cheating? I don’t think so.
Committing Yourself
Another point that Jill has raised which does concern me is she has committed herself to try a friends dog with no experience of using the pastel pencils.If I were in Jill’s shoes I would put this on hold for the time being and practice using the pastel pencils on other animal projects, by taking the commission on at this stage Jill will be in for a few sleepless nights.What do you think about using Drawing Aids? Have you committed to doing a commission and then regretted it? Let us know in the comments below.If you'd like to try Colin's free courses then simply click here.