The Blinded Artist

Intro

I will try to keep this tutorial as short and informative as possible. The tutorial is about a certain, and quite useful experience I have gathered, since I changed from drawing with traditional tools, to drawing almost only digitally. There is nothing super revolutionary about this experience, but it eliminates a well-known problem that most artists must face, during the process of making a painting or drawing. We'll start out with a simple analogy.

Hey! Where did the speed go?
Most of us have travelled by car at a fairly high speed, and know about the phenomena of speed blindness. The eyes quickly get used to the speed driven, and shortly after it seems like we're not moving quite as fast as we initially did, even though we're travelling at the very same speed.



One quickly developes a tolerance and blindness for the speed, at which he or she is moving. Something similar happens when an artist works many hours on a specific drawing or painting, without any pauses. The artist developes a tolerance and blindness for the piece he or she is working on. This blindness and tolerance just relates to proportions, symmetrics and shapes. The eyes get more and more tolerant and uncritical, the longer he or she is working on the same artpiece without any breaks. Many artists solves this problem by taking a break, leaving the artpiece for a while, to return later with a "fresh" pair of eyes. After the pause flaws and errors in the artpiece stand out more clearly. But how can one go about eliminating this "blindness" without taking breaks?

A simple solution
The solution to this problem should prove to be almost too simple. The solution is to mirror your artpiece in any way possible. Try to work on an artpiece for some hours and then mirror it, and you'll see what I mean. With your image mirrored all the flaws and errors will stand out quite clear. Like mentioned the solution is dead simple, but it is quite effective and my experiences with this method are good. And above all it speeds up your working process. Try it!

Mirror, mirror on the wall
To end the tutorial I have made a short list on some possible ways to mirror your artpiece. There are probably other ways to mirror your artwork than the ones listed below. The most important is that you find a method that suits you.

• Flip over your art piece, and shine some light through it from behind
• Scan/Snapshot your art piece, open or import it into your preferred graphics application and mirror it
• Hold up your piece infront of a mirror

That's it for now. Go mirror that art!