February Illustrated
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Looking through some of my high school reports yesterday and the one subject that I consistently got terrible marks in was art. Apparently I didn’t try and had extremely low-expectations of my own abilities. All I remember is that Mrs. Layfield told me that my painting of a jungle scene was wonderful and would win the monthly school art prize if I just tidied it up a little. I took this to mean that I should add a cartoon tiger, a la Henri Rousseau. She told me that I had ruined it: it was awful now and impossible to put right.
Partly to exorcise the ghost of this memory, my experiment in living for February is to do one drawing everyday to illustrate my blog posts here. They are going to be simple, naive, and essentially mediocre, but I hope that I will get better and more confident each day.
My drawing inspirations are Rob Ryan, Gwyn, the London 2012 logo, and Aubrey Beardsley. I like simplicity, humour, white space, and a lot of contrast.
I did think about doing an hour a day of Spanish, but I might leave that for March as my in-laws arrive on the 1st April and I want my language learning to be fresh in the mind so that I can converse with them (“Which direction is the library?”). Also, learning Spanish feels a lot like hard work, whereas drawing is play.
By the way, if I go to Spain this year I definitely want to see Andalucia: the architecture is so moorish.