L
imitations are the fertilizer of creativity. We naturally might thing that the opposite might be true; that we will be most creative when we have the fewest constraints, but au contraire.
I’ve been feeling lost in my art recently, and I suspect that I've not been constrained enough in what I’m trying to accomplish. At the same time, I'm almost "too good" at what I typically attempt, such that there's not enough friction in working things out for me to feel enlivened by the process.
However, in getting Blackletter closer and closer to print, I've needed to develop art assets for it, and I elected to use a style that is very different from my normal approach. Usually, I'm a linesman -- I work almost exclusively with lines, demarcating planes and silhouettes, perspective and dimensionality, all by dividing the plane. However, for Blackletter, I'm now working exclusively with blocks of black and white, no lines allowed. I take a hard, blocky burush, and cut and carve back and forth between positive and negative; no lines allowed. I force myself to use a large brush at first, blocking out big shapes, and then move downward slowly, getting finer and finer detail.
It's very different from how I usually work, and exhilirating when it turns out well. This new "assignment" I've given myself, with its own particular demands and challenges, has me as excited about drawing as I've felt perhaps more than a year, which is always a cool thing to be going through.