Do you wring your hands, stomp and shout, weep bitter tears or just find a pal and head for the bar?
Or do you take a long, thoughtful look at the masterpiece gone wrong and see if there is anything there worth salvaging?
You know my story, I've been laboring mightily over a high contrast nude for the last three or four weeks and I finished it yesterday. And what a pile-o it is, I don't know where it went wrong, something in the anatomy or perspective, but it just isn't right.
Yes, I haven't been at this very long and I've had no training in anatomy, so there's no reason why I should be upset, except I am. I really do expect everything I do to turn out brilliant.
Except it didn't.
I think it started when I got the poor dear's nose too long. Now the lady in my original had a petite little nose and rather fine features. Not in my drawing, she looks more like a Picasso. (Of course that's just my way of saying bad, distorted, sorry, and it isn't fair to Picasso, because he really was a very fine artist with a complete command of anatomy and perspective. He just didn't want to do it that way and we are probably better because he didn't.)
But back to my sad little drawing, shortly after I gave her the face of a horse, I added Kirk Douglas' chin. I mentioned having to do a Kirkectomy? Yeah I did and she's the better for it. And then I went to work on her body.
Now you would think after fifty-two years of staring at girls, (I make no excuses, I like girls/women/females whatever the non-offensive term is, I like'em. Always have and I find they are devilishly difficult to draw with any accuracy which makes them wonderful subjects for practice because it is almost impossible to get them right and yet they are so charming you can stare at them for hours. (Now of course if you are a lady artist you probably don't share the same fondness for staring at women I do, or perhaps you do which is just fine, so we can move on to actually staring without any further ado.) Back to where I left that poor sentence dangling which is not as bad as dangling a participle, or so I've been told by the masters of the Black Arts, Grammar and Spelling, I like staring at women and have done...okay, more than my share, so you would think I could get their bodies right after all of that, but no, I squished her into some sort of Mezzo-American fertility fetish. And then there's the shading of the background, but I guess you see where I am headed, this did not turn out as I'd planned.
But I like most of it anyway. That's a big surprise, right? But it is true and I have plans for my misshapen lady. See in making her wrong I made her interesting in ways I could never have planned. This is something I learned from photography. The camera takes exactly what you point it at even if that is all wrong and has no light and sometimes that makes for a better picture than you had planned.
So I took my mangled lady and ran her through the computer and made some changes...
And I liked them! But it wasn't quite what I wanted, so back to the computer and diddled some more...
Very Picasso and good but maybe one more try?
Now I really am scr...confused, you see when I finished this drawing I was really unhappy. All I wanted to do with it was stuff it in the shredder and be rid of it, but now, I like my compacted female and I have a much bigger problem.
Which one of the ones I like should I enter in In the Flesh?
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