Handwriting

Due in part to yesterday's comic-drawing frenzy, I started musing in my journal about how often it is that you find yourself unable to draw even the simplest things; things you might look at a hundred times a day. It's partly that old truism (which I first came across via Danny Gregory), that you can really only know things after you've drawn them. Before this fact, what you draw is more likely to be your mind's image of the object: Coffee Cup, Bus, etc. By looking long and hard at something and drawing it specifically, you notice all the particulars that make it unique. Fine. Plenty of validity to Gregory's slow-as-snails contour practices.
But having done a fair amount of these observational sketches, what I keep being struck by is how unnatural each one feels (and looks) after the fact. The lines are always fractured and broken, there is either too much detail or not enough, and it reeks of trying overly hard to render exactly what I'm seeing in precise detail rather than making, well, a drawing of it. But maybe this is part of the exercise? (Ashley, I'm looking to you here).
My eye then wandered over my various notes to myself, and I realized that one thing I am totally comfortable with is my handwriting.
When we're young we're taught how to write cursive and to cultivate 'good' handwriting, and this stays or wears off to varying degrees as years pass. For my part, I went through a very clean handwriting phase, then went off the deep end in the other direction, filling notebooks with completely illegible (I'm talkin' like a heartscan) scribbles. Now I look back at my journals from the past several months, and see that my handwriting has settled into a style that I very much approve of. It's messy and occasionally still illegible, but it's very me. It has it's own character and eccentricities. After all this time, I've found my proper expression with it.
This got me thinking: how do you achieve such a thing in other forms? In my sketches, I still lack any kind of identity. Same thing with songwriting. In both fields I find it much easier to create pieces that imitate someone else than try my own thing (as I may have written prior, each of my FAWM songs was a direct attempt to be like a specific artist), under the premise that through imitation, eventually your own style shines through.

I offer up the following sketches that I did this evening as examples of this dilemma.

The Doubtful Guest























Cat and Girl























Pintsize (from Questionable Content)

























My hand can imitate these styles, but I know that none of them are my own, per se. So what does it take? I know the only real answer is that long, hard road of daily practice. But lordy, those contour sketches can really get a boy down. What say you, friends?