Tag: quote

A Christmas Quote

The Christmas season has a tendency to make me feel like a kid again, no matter how old I get. Dickens seems to have had a similar feeling:

“For it is good to be children sometimes, and never better than at Christmas, when its mighty Founder was a child Himself.” – Charles Dickens

It’s good to be a kid again, even if just for a few weeks.

Draw What You Want to See

Jeff Watts said something I’d never heard said before, and it’s given me a new perspective on my efforts to grow into a solid illustrator. In an episode of the Draftsmen Podcast, he said:

“I personally would like to paint it the way I would like to see it, not the way I’m seeing it. I will respect what I’m seeing. I’ll intellectually banter with it a little bit and have some dialogue with it, but I don’t necessarily have to be literal with it. So that’s where I think the felt sense comes in. That’s where you would start to go, ‘ok, well, what feels right to me?'”

On the writing side, the common advice is to write the book you want to read, but I’ve never heard it applied to visual arts like this. I’ve always just tried to draw something as I saw it, without much thought other than trying to get it right.

That’s not to say there isn’t value in drawing accurately, in learning the technical skills, the fundamentals. But, looking at something and thinking, “what feels right to me?”, is a different ballgame, and it’s one I look forward to playing.

Gifts of the Muse

From the foreword to Le Guin’s The Wind’s Twelve Quarters. I love the way she talks with such reverence about writing.

“The relation between short story and novel, inside the writer’s head, is interesting. ‘Semley’s Necklace,’ though a complete story in itself, was the germ of a novel. I had done with Semley when I finished it, but there was a minor character, a mere by-stander, who did not sink back obediently into obscurity when the story was done, but who kept nagging me. ‘Write my story,’ he said. ‘I’m Rocannon. I want to explore my world. . . .’ So I obeyed him. You really can’t argue with these people.

‘Winter’s King’ was another such germinal story, and so were ‘The Word of Unbinding’ and ‘The Rule of Names,’ though all of them gave me the place, rather than the person, for the novels to come. The last story in the book is not a germinal but an autumnal one. It came after the novel, a final gift, received with thanksgiving.”