Art vs. Writing, My Personal Experience

I was hit by the fan art bug this weekend. My experience got me thinking about how I experience drawing as opposed to writing.

Drawing is such a different experience for me. When I write I tend to "go away" to my happy place, but I can be easily interrupted and it's not that hard for me to return to it if I have to quit for a minute or two. When I draw, I'm down for the count. You can't rouse me until the picture is finished to my satisfaction, which, in some cases, can be two or three runs at the same piece. The picture below, in fact, is a "take two." I really loved the movement in the original and it took a couple of tries to get his body parts all in the right places. :-)




This is why Shawn teases me about being "obsessive." It's not so much that it occupies more of my brain, but I'm really unavailable when I draw in a way that I'm not when I write.

I should say too that my art is ultimately more frustrating than my writing. Like writing, art takes a lot of practice, and there's something that happens... hurdles you push past to become better at it. At some point in high school, I got to the point with my art (which I practiced constantly, I remember spending entire Sundays sitting at my drawing board) where I could reliably "copy" an image. If the folks at Marvel had drawn it (or I cut it out of a magazine or someone sat for me), I could produce a reasonable facsimile of my own.

I've never gotten beyond that stage. Not really. I can draw someone standing around, or with minimal animation, as it were. But, that's it. Otherwise I still have to look at someone else's work and essentially mentally copy it.

With writing, I managed to get past the "fanfic" stage (after a sufficient amount of practice there as well.) Anything I can imagine, I can usually get on the page. I'm a fan artist at best -- though to be fair to the fan artist community out there, there are some ridiculously professional-level artists out there, who clearly are beyond the "cover band" stage that I'm at with my drawing.

Writing also... relieves the pressures in my head. If I get a story that's burning up my brain out, on paper, it's gone. I'm done with it. Art, for me, spawns a stronger desire for MORE.