My mom’s side of the family is inexplicably good at realism drawing. Nobody had ever been to art school or taken drawing lessons, so maybe it just ran in the family the same way entire families went on to become dentists, or something.
I realised my potential in grade 1. My earliest memory of it is the teacher asking us all to draw a cat in our workbooks with no point of reference. My cat looked better than everyone else’s, and my classmates gathered around to look. It surprised me as much as everyone else. I wasn’t good at much else, like sports or making friends, so having found my forte, I became obsessed with refining my drawing techniques.
Fast forward to the present. Almost all of my drawings up to that point were in black and white. One day, I came across a hyper-realistic colour pencil drawing of a balloon animal done by someone else. I set a personal challenge to draw something with coloured pencils and achieve the exact same level of meticulous detail.
I decided to draw and colour a violin and frame it on my bedroom wall. I hoped that it would be the best drawing I had ever done. I found a HD photo, downloaded it in the highest resolution, and gathered some charcoal sticks and pencils.
This is the outline with some light colouring, because I just couldn’t be bothered to wait to finish the entire stencil before colouring.
Here’s a close up. It took several hours, spaced out over days, to reach this stage. I initially filled the f-hole with my darkest charcoal, but it wasn’t dark enough so I used a gel pen to colour over it. I used a ruler for the strings and fingerboard and a pen to line the inner contours of the top plate. I used the Faber Castell 48-watercolour pencil set for colouring. I made swatches on a piece of scrap paper and labelled each one with the corresponding colour codes. So far, so good.
I was starting to feel pretty proud of this.
I used charcoal to shade in the tailpiece and 6/7B pencils for the shadow under the fingerboard. At this point, the drawing was starting to get tedious. The process was meditative, for sure, but I felt overwhelmed by all the tiny little details. There were so many of them to replicate if I wanted the end result to measure up to my expectations.
During this time I found I had the ability to hyperfocus for hours and days (missing mealtimes, not leaving home, and staying up to work) while simultaneously not having the patience to finish each segment completely before moving on. You can see how I stopped shading in the tailpiece halfway through to move to the fingerboard, where I arbitrarily shaded only the gap between the G and D strings. This is all while ignoring the incomplete side portion.
This was after adding more fine details and shading:
I’m almost done with the tailpiece here. Again, I stopped halfway to continue shading the unfinished fingerboard. I compared it to the photo to make sure I was on the right track and that there weren’t any material deviations from the reference. I was confident that the finish line was within sight.
All right. Looking good. We’re getting there.
I had been working this whole time in my room, under warm white lights. I took it out into the hallway to see how the colours looked in cool white light, which in retrospect was something I should have done much earlier before things got this far. They looked vastly different. I used too much red for the auburn-coloured areas, and in the cool white light they had more red than brown.
I took it back to my room to fix. I lightly erased some of the dark brown parts to lift the red pigments and re-apply more brown. I took it out again into the hallway. Still too red. I took it back again to my room. But this time, when I erased the reddish parts, I tore a hole in the paper.
I still think I subconsciously did it on purpose. While my artistic process is chaotic and disorganised, I’m a perfectionist when it comes to the final product. I probably felt it was ruined by applying the wrong colours and that continuing with it was futile, so I ‘forced’ myself to stop by ‘accidentally’ damaging the paper beyond repair.
So, there it is. I’ve still kept it all these years. And I’ve tried a few times to start over. But the initial failure of my first attempt became an insurmountable mental hurdle. Subsequently I could never progress beyond 10% completion during the 2nd, 3rd, and nth attempt. I felt none of them looked as good as the original. It made me afraid to try again. I don’t know if I have the energy to start over again. I wish I did.
–
Writing this now, I realised this mental hurdle is also a recurring motif in many aspects of my life. I’m scared to try again because of all the times it didn’t work out. I’d rather give up or end things and projects the moment they don’t go as expected. Once something triggers my fear of failure, I abandon all hope of fixing things.
It hadn’t been a productive Sunday. It was more of a chance for me to catch up on rest. I only went out long enough to grab a hazelnut latte and convert my Thai Baht back to BND. I didn’t go to the gym like planned, or start decluttering, which I had been putting off since a few days ago. But perhaps accidentally naming my penchant for self-sabotage was a big psychological breakthrough and enough of an accomplishment for today.
Who knew a drawing with a hole in it from 5 years ago still held epiphanies waiting to be discovered?
–
Maybe I should give this drawing another shot.
–
What if it doesn’t work out?
But what if it does?