Is Academic drawing necessary for oil painting?
This question, "is academic drawing necessary for oil painting?" bothered me for so long. Since I didn't graduate from an art school, I wasn't sure if academic training is the secret recipe for an artist. So I've tried every way to search for the answer to it. But, in the end, I think the best way to find the answer to yourself is just to do it, experience it yourself, and see what you feel.
I don't know about you, but classical atelier drawing sounds scary to me. My image towards it is shading a cast by pencil day after day for months, copying the old master's artworks with 1mm precision, and it's the bland side of art. That's why I started to learn oil painting without going through all the pencil work hustle.
And then I hit a roadblock. My artworks didn't come out the way I wanted them to be. So I tried the cast drawing with graphite pencils.
It was torture in the beginning. I've been working on the same cast for ten weeks. I tried to be as precise as possible. At the same time, I also worked on the drawing as slowly as possible since it was my first cast drawing.
At halfway through, I didn't even want to enter the studio. It was mentally challenging and little fun. I kept wondering if the academic rendering and shading are necessary. Is there any way to skip this process altogether, if possible? Why am I doing this to myself?
The result of my cast drawing answered it for me. Like athletes training their muscles, artists have to train how to see the subject matter in front of them.
I came across dialogue in Japanese animation.
"you can't feel the enjoyment because you are not good at it."
It describes my relationship with the cast. However, the only way to be good at something is to practice. There's no way around it.
After a year of running away from the reality that I need more training, I finally started to draw every single day. Maybe not academic drawing necessarily, but drawing anything you see is necessary for the oil painting style I want to achieve.
