We watch people drawing so well that their piece looks real and wonder why we can only do stick people. We watch YouTube tutorials and see people copying the instructors, and trying to do it as perfectly. Sadly, we draw our stick people and eventually think we might as well give up because we simply are not artists. There is a secret here: we need to practice and practice and practice by doing doing doing to develop MUSCLE MEMORY.
Muscle Memory develops motor skills with little thought, like, how do our feet know to lift to go upstairs, and, for the most part, lift them the exact height? In 1982, I had a brain bleed and I had to learn to swim, crawl, walk again. It took a long time for my muscles to remember, on their own, to lift for stairs. I had to silently talk to my muscles to lift and move ahead… stairs were a huge thing. But my muscles remembered each time I tried and I tried and tried and practiced and practiced, and I can climb stairs without thought within about a year. Muscle memory is a huge deal for body movements that become automatic and we need to give little thought to those movements, but the muscles do learn and we can learn to develop finer and finer motor control. Muscle Memory is called “Procedural Memory” and it improves the more we repeat movements. As artists, this is how the hands and fingers and wrists and arms memorize movements and our artistic skills improve the more we practice.
This is why, in university, we spent a semester copying masterpieces and the artists that are famous for style and technique and ability to paint great masterpieces. We drew rocks and textiles and paper bags for a semester. We were teaching our own brain how to hold the brushes, the pencils, how to draw shapes and symbols, and the brain learned quickly. We learn by doing. The way we imprint knowledge for movements for art, is to watch and copy, repeating artistic movements to train the brain to do art more efficiently, more quickly and better than before.
Once in a while, I will sketch with paint, a brush, any medium, to check to see what my Procedural Memory has learned. I can see such improvement and it is how I can, once in a while, feel really satisfied with art that I do. I did an acrylic painting and I wanted to capture what I did with the portrait because I loved the original. I decided to use watercolor and sketch with it. With a few strokes, some water, some pushing an pulling of brush, I captured something that looked better than it had just months before. I do the same with my art students. They practice with carbon paper and painting in what they see of a master copy. Some spend weeks, some take months, but you can see them succeed better and better as their brain trains. In between times, I introduce new skills and techniques and I can see that they are drawing perfect circles by heart, are starting to get the mathematics of a face better, and their hands do better and better at their art because they are practicing.
Copy, ‘sisterartists’, copy, copy, and copy and watch a hundred YouTube tutorials and train your brain to be a better artist.
©Carol Desjarlais 4.4.23
No comments:
Post a Comment