Forgetting What Came Naturally

 I write and draw between a couple of screens and a drawing table, surrounded by a couple dozen of favorite images on the walls. Favorite images that I created over another few dozen years. They are good company - mostly. I say mostly because recently they have come to display a disconcerting side. Let me explain.

When I am creating the black and white line drawings for a piece, if I get "stuck" for ideas I will often kick back and look at the images around me to jog my memory and get the juices flowing. It usually works, but recently I have begun to encounter a disconcerting glitch. I'll look at an image and realize "I don't know how I did that." 

Take this piece for example:

It is called Look Through any Window, it is 4x5 feet, and I did it back in '03.    Everything in the front portion of the image, the yellow wall and its windows and flowers, were hand drawn as black and white images, but all the "coloring" was done in Photoshop - the shading, fading, etc. In addition, the upper portion of the image is heavy on Photoshop. The outlines of the buildings and the openings for windows were hand drawn. The bricks, however, were sort of "Photoshop assisted." To avoid having to draw each one, I would draw a block of windows and then copy and paste to fill the walls.  The contents of the windows in that upper section were "cut and pasted" from photos I had taken previously, pasted again via Photoshop.

So, yes, I can explain how I did it, but now when I open the software to do something it has changed. I don't mean Photoshop has changed, but my hands don't know where to go. Let me explain again. The best analogy I can think of is one I regret never having availed myself of, except in the most modest sense - playing a musical instrument that requires two hands. I stumbled through adolescent attempts at both the piano and the guitar. I have no recollection of piano at all, and can recall but three chords on the guitar, C, D and G.

The point is that folks who are actually proficient on those instruments don't have to think "right hand does this and left hand does that." It just happens. Muscle memory flows smoothly hitting the right strings or keys at the appropriate time to make music. Photoshop used to be like that for me. I had a stylus in my right hand to interact directly with the screen and my left hand would do the alt-clicks and whatnot for color, shading, whatever. Point is I didn't have to think about it. It just happened. 

No more. Photoshop is an incredibly powerful piece of software, and if you don't know how to tickle it just right, it just sits there and stares at you. It is, of course, my fault. The old "use it or lose it " syndrome kicks in. For the last few years I have used the software pretty simplistically to help create outlines from my photographs - or when "borrowing" images from Vermeer or Michelanglo. My emphasis has been more on the "filling in the blanks" part. Remember my version of "Girl with the Pearl Earring?"

Soooo. Not sure which way to go. Recently I did some "cleaning up" lines - go over 3 pixel width drawn lines with a five pixel cursor to sharpen edges - on a self-portrait (which didn't really help - so that image will live in the "never mind" bin). Nonetheless, I felt a bit of a pull back to the old full-featured Photoshop. 

I have just started a new image based on cranes in flight. Given the nation's current cultural and political chaos, I felt a need for their timeless tranquility. There is space for Photoshop in there somewhere. I'll let you now how it turns out.