Another Friday morning in “France”… 😉 aka. downtown Kernersville, I was on my own this particular day so I chose a view I might not have done had there been others with me.  This is looking into the courtyard of the Factory where the fountain is, the lamp posts and iron bridges, and the little shop fronts like the one with the black and white polka-dotted awning.  I took my time drawing with my Schaeffer pen to capture the full view of this building looking down into the courtyard.

I liked it well enough.  Though I discovered that my shoulders were up around my ears several times throughout the drawing process (concentrated efforts at perspective, and a bit of measuring tends to tense me up a little).  So I decided to draw the same view, a little zoomed in, but with a more meditative contour drawing, following one line for as long as I could before starting another.

And this one made me smile.  The following Friday when an artist friend rejoined me to draw downtown, she and I were talking about how we make drawings for the “correctness” of it all, to record more accurately what we see,  and then we make the ones that make us smile.  Both are valid ways to draw.  Both are beneficial.  But I prefer the letting go of “correctness” for simply “what pleases me”.

Try it sometime.  Make a drawing to record as accurately as you can the scene before you, and then make another in whatever way you want to, that just pleases you.  Perhaps you’ll find that the FIRST drawing pleases you the most.  Maybe it’ll be the next one, or the next one. It’s really cool to discover these things about your preferences in art along the way.