Hyper-realistic vs. suggestive drawing styles
November 21, 2021
Hyper-realistic or suggestive?

In high school, I was OBSESSED with drawing objects so accurately that the viewer might mistakenly try and lift them off the page. I liked certainty. This copy of a Clinique eyeliner ad was a case in point.
While I was making this, I remember slicing my Staedler eraser — the “cream cheese” eraser — with an X-Acto Knife. I wanted my glints and metallic reflections to have a laser-like accuracy.
Today I am hopelessly enamoured with the blobs and squiggles of suggestive drawings. And it’s not just because suggestive renderings hide a multitude of proportional sins.

As a writer, I spend ages choosing and moving my words around in the right order to approximate a complex emotion. At my art desk, a suggestive drawing best captures the uncertainty and fragility in the act of living
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