Temporary Amnesia

Quickie Updates

  • I’ve just reserved the name Angelic Shades L.L.C. with my county. Just one step closer to actually registering the business! Just have to do a little MOAR RESEARCH first.
  • How anti-climactic. I’ve just received my Masters degree in Arts Administration in the mail…after being graduated for almost a year now. Margarita time!
  • In another miracle of productivity involving two sleepless nights, I’ve completed my entry for DA’s Bring Your Vision to Life contest. I doubt I have a snowball’s chance in HFIL but it was fun to be able to enter a contest. I normally watch them pass by and long for the free time it takes to enter.

Now, on to the post…

After drawing about 10 faces and heads for a tutorial, it occurred to me that I had randomly forgotten how to draw ears. It’s true, I know what an ear looks like. I see them on my head, and the heads of other people, every day…and yet, I just could not draw the ear properly for the life of me, which was not so conducive to getting a tutorial on drawing heads completed.

This has happened to me before when I’ll look down in complete horror at a sketch and realize that a character’s head is two times too big or he has the hands of a greyback gorilla instead of the masculine handsome hands I was aiming for.

It’s not that I don’t know what hands look like and that I don’t know how to draw them, I just seemed incapable of drawing that particular feature on that particular day.

What causes this widespread phenomena amongst artists? Is it a matter of merely being out of practice at minuscule details? Is there some invisible gremlin muse sitting on the ends of our pencils laughing maniacally as he forces our pencil to make the wrong choice of curvature? Perhaps we’ve merely forgotten at that specific moment of time where all of our previous practice and training vanishes thanks to temporary amnesia?

Or maybe it’s the margaritas? (I swear I wasn’t drinking one when this first started occurring today!)

The mind boggles and I blame J.J. Abrams just because I can.

Anyone else suffer from this condition? Share your tales of woe so that we may lament together in our temporary ineptitude!

3 comments

  1. Fayn says:

    I suffer all the time from this I pretty much understand the BARE minimum of anatomy but for some reasons my stuff will sometimes just goes the other way

  2. Hayley E. Lavik says:

    I remember this used to happen to me in trying to recall those connecting parts, how one part of the body transitions from the other, and things would go wonky. The same occurs in my writing. Sometimes it is just not possible to recall the word I want, despite using it every single bloody day. Other times it’s worse, and I lose all capacity for description, pleasing analogy, or, god-forbid, stringing a compelling story together. I’ve seen my writing degenerate into mindless “and then this happened, and then this happened” chatter and then I stop and stare at it, marveling at the lack of attention of breakdown in mental function that produces it.

    It usually tells me I need a day to recharge, replenish the juices with something other than my own words to read, and some time to let things steep.

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