The unimportance of realism with people in your basic paintings: silly is fun!

A lot of the students in my classes are easily frustrated with how difficult it can be to accurately represent people or even animals in their drawings and painting especially when they are first starting out. This frustration can lead to them just outright quitting when they could really possess a real talent for other things. We need to keep in mind that some of the greats like Picasso's best works have absolutely absurd representations of both people and animals. This isn't to say that they were incapable of making these sorts of things, they certainly were, but it wasn't the focus of their greatness and honestly, drawing a very realistic portrait is something that is valuable and requires great talent, but to a lot of people this is just so common that it rarely attracts the eyes of most people.

While we do work on portraits and the rather large amount of complications that come along with drawing a person, I encourage my students in their quick art - I only get them for a bit over an hour - to not waste time on being concerned about the creatures in their drawings being anatomically accurate, or even resembling what it is supposed to be.

I tell them that the whimsical and silly are often more appreciated in drawings than the things that look completely accurate and also since we don't have enough time to just "wing it" and let's see what happens.

Many of my student's work ends up looking similar to one another and this is kind of expected since everyone kind of looks at what everyone else is doing and in a way they also kind of emulate what it is that I will demonstrate. I encourage them to not copy me or anyone else but I kind of enjoyed how this particular student represented the humans in the picture they made.

Look at the people there: Most of their heads are not attached to their bodies, you can see through most of them, and if you want to nitpick, a lot of them don't even have arms. That being said, it is obvious to the observer that these are in fact, people. It is a big group of people actually and while art lies in the eyes of the beholder, to me it seems as though this big group of people, because of how hazy they are, appear to be in a hurry. When I asked the student if this was the case he said "YES!" and was delighted that I was able to figure this out without being told that this was the case.

This student also used some techniques that we practice in class often in that he didn't bother with getting the color in the lines, so to speak and at least in my mind, this isn't really necessary. The idea here isn't to create a super realistic landscape or picture of an actual city. The idea is to create something almost dreamlike where the person looking at it can fill in the blanks to determine what is going on here. To many people, like me, this is the essence of good art. A painting should tell a story without telling it.

I am reminded of the rather boring paintings that my parents would buy when I was young and they were very accurate representations of scenery - almost to the point where from a distance it appeared to be a photograph and it wasn't until you got up close that you could see the bumps of the paint and realize that it wasn't a photo.

While there is nothing wrong with this kind of art, it also isn't terribly special and this is reflected in the fact that my rather frugal parents were able to afford several of these despite not being fans of art in any real sense. To them, it was just something to put over the sofa in the living room and they likely paid almost nothing for it. Who the artist is may actually never be known because the work of whoever that artist happened to be was something that could have been done by anyone. There was nothing "special" or unique about it.

The fact that my students feel as though they are doing the "right" thing by not having their pieces be accurate representations is just an added bonus. This is not to say that accurate representations is a bad thing, it certainly is not because all art can be wonderful depending on who is looking at it. I just believe that if you get all hung up on making sure that every little detail has to be accurate and true to life in order for it to be "good" that most artists will simply give up because that is very difficult to pull of and is more mathematical than it is artistic.

If you are drawing or painting I always encourage people to not just accept their mistakes, but to embrace them especially if they find themselves making the same mistakes over and over again. If you are an artist or an aspiring artist, maybe you would benefit by taking this information to heart as well.