How to make a piece of art

Firstly: Choose an appropriate subject upon which to base your drawing.

Fig. 1: duck, suitable for drawing

Next: Begin to draw your subject. Make sure to completely obliterate the character of your subect, and if possible introduce as many dischordant colors and unattractive visual elements into your piece as possible. If you are lucky, this will be your art teacher’s response:

Fig. 2: art teacher takes matters into own hands

Do not be concerned if your teacher begins literally tearing your work into shreds. This merely means that you have accomplished your goal and are well on your way to art. But you’re not quite there yet. Your teacher will probably want to play with the composition of your newly liberated shreds of art…

Fig. 3: picking up the pieces

… At which time she may or may not decide that the piece needs more… ah… coaxing.

Fig. 4: and a bit more deconstruction

After three or four minutes of dutifully watching your teacher work on “your” piece, voila! We have art!

Fig. 5: Art.

… As you may be able to guess, yesterday was just one of those days in art class. Every once in a while a day will roll around in which I have the hardest time creating anything interesting. I mean, first of all, I chose a duck figurine to draw. That was my first mistake. My second mistake was just making a really bad drawing. And although my teacher’s methods may seem drastic, I actually think she is an awesome teacher and her “deconstruction” of my drawing was really helpful.

I may not be able to claim the art as “mine” now, but that’s not really the point of our class anyway. The point is I learned a lot from watching her tear up my piece with reckless abandon–and the fact is, it came out way better and more interesting than it was before. So there you go. A real art lesson.

Posted on Wednesday, April 12th, 2006 at 11:20 pm.
Belongs with: Creative Things, Photo Things.
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