Does this matter at all to people?”
“Drawing faces doesn’t matter,” he mumbled, “But how does you put your hands on a drawing table?”
I explained that the problem was very different if not totally different from my normal drawing process.
“But how does you go about making it go ‘hmmm’?” I continued. “How do you make it look like a face?”
“It’s just like I did a face,” he blurted out.
“No, it’s not,” I shot back. “You did a face. This is how you make something look like a face. Make it like a face. You’re not making it look like a face, you’re making it look like a face.”
That’s the trick! The thing that you need to get down in your mind is that we don’t draw faces, but a head and a heart. Your mouth is just an outline of your actual jawline, but you’re using something like a chisel or a razor to keep the outline in place.
That’s why you can’t just see a head but you can actually see a heart and a face. Just like I could see a man standing in front of me and he looked a lot like John. The heart and the head are both drawing the face but each is drawing two different things at once. And if you use those two different things simultaneously, you will get a different effect.”
“I see.”
“Right. So, draw a face? Does this matter at all?”
He opened his mouth like a fish, but then he just stared at me.
“You can draw faces for yourself all you want and it will look like a face, but how do you put your hands on a drawing table?”
The man sighed and shook his head like he was shaking a tree.
“Now I understand,” I said. “Now I can understand what the hell you’re trying to tell me!”
His face still didn’t change. His heart and head were still just drawn like an outline of the neck. The hand was still drawn like a crutch.
But in that moment of staring at the blank slate, the man realized something…
He saw the world of art, and he saw the world of magic.
The magic was magic.
If you want to draw your way to understanding the workings of magic in life, it starts