*Apologetic disclaimer before this blog post starts. Looks like there was a slight user error glitch on my end linking subscribers to this site. But we should be all good to go now! Sorry if I’ve appeared MIA, quite the contrary. On the plus side, you now have a whole evening’s worth of getting to know Caitlin Ng awaiting you, lucky you!
You best bet I’m drawing up a storm over here! For those of you who know me well, you know that drawing has been a constant in my life since…well practically forever. Picture a 4-year old already committed to the rhythm of waking up at the crack of dawn, sitting at the table with her stack of white paper and black ball-point pens, and unleashing all her pent up creativity from sleep. As a result, stacks upon stacks of unfinished illustrated stories are crowding my parents’ garage. Unfortunately I haven’t maintained that practice at age 30, but I will say that this school has allowed for the time and space to intentionally work that back into my norm.
We got to delve into the foundations and basics of drawing recently. And while the years of experience I’ve accumulated both from my childhood habits and my formal art school training have served me well, there is a very fundamental difference this time around. It’s rooted in the act of seeing. You’d be surprised how hard seeing can actually be. I don’t mean just looking, I mean soaking in what it quite literally before your eyes for all that it is and it’s context. What often trips up an artist is matching what’s on the page to what’s in front of you. That is largely because we tend to work out of assumption; our brains assume that we already know where the shadows on an apple fall or how to portray eye lashes accurately. But the reality is, we immediately set up limitations to our art and ourselves when we do that. We prohibit any creativity from taking place when we get so cocky that we take our eyes off of the main point, the object of our artwork.
Perspective lesson with park benches.
If you’re tracking, you most likely recognized how much of this so holistically transfers on to how we view our lives and God. Are we acting out prematurely, assuming we know what people and life are about? Or even worse, cutting off God and Holy Spirit from fully expressing himself? I know that for myself, the process of seeing a person entirely as a beloved child of God, fearfully and wonderfully made, is sometimes one of the most difficult tasks of my day. But that’s how God wholly sees them! Or to take it back to my art process, sitting and observing thoroughly to the extent that I am left marveling at God’s genius can more often than not feel so tedious. When we’re faced with that frustration, the sheer fallibility of our humanity contrasted against the brilliance of God’s creativity is pretty undeniable.
The good news in all this is that there’s always the grace and room to see more. to see better. to squint, blink, and try again. hallelujah!
Quick blind contour warm-ups. *A blind contour is when you don’t look down at your paper or lift up your pencil once for the entire drawing session.
5 minute charcoal study of Kai. It’s been a hot minute touching charcoal. I forgot how gratifying it is to get your hands dirty and play with such high contrast.
prayer requests:
Carnaval starts tonight! YWAM Mazatlan drops all normal scheduling and jumps in to full-time ministering to the masses that travel from all over the world to one of the largest Carnaval celebrations. I will be a part of the art ministry doing some live painting in the thick of the crowds, as well as some portrait drawing at the YWAM coffee stand during the evening. Prayers for cool interactions and conversations, energy, safety, and for Holy Spirit to inspire my art.
Outreach fundraising! I have 9 partners in this school and all are in the process of fundraising for the next phase of our school.
Sounds simple, but just being confidant in myself, my ‘style’ of loving on people in the name of our Lord and what I know to be true. I am surrounded by Christians from many, many walks of life and it can be easy to subscribe to believing that there is one, right way to see, feel, and hear God.