Watts Atelier Boot Camp 2016 - Part 1
"When the ideas in your brain start coming out better on paper and canvas than they were in your head, something changes." - Jeffrey R. Watts
BY ANTHONY ROSS
In April of this year I signed up for a month of the online Watts Atelier courses. It was about six months to a year before that when I first listened to the talk Jeffrey R. Watts gives in this video: How to Train to Become a Successful Working Artist. The video covers the basic fundamentals of what Jeff Watts, founder of Watts Atelier, has understood from 25-30 years of teaching and training to be a professional artist from a very young age, tapping into all genres and a large variety of industry jobs. After I listened to this, now multiple times, I was very inspired to pursue the excellency in this craft, to fall in love with improving and working to get better and to work as an artist in the kind of way that I've always dreamed of. In other words, I was inspired to get intuitive in my craft by doing hours of visual memorizing through drawing and painting.
I was taking Schoolism classes and had been inspired by Bobby Chiu and the other artists on this site. I had gone to a Schoolism workshop in Vancouver before knowing what Watts Atelier was and began to draw more with a better understanding of what to work on to get better. It was very inspiring and it lead me to taking Schoolism online classes, which I'm still taking, because they are great lessons and affordable. That being said, it wasn't until Jeff Watts's articulate speech on what it takes to be professional that I really felt the inspiration to promise myself that I will work hard to get there. The words, "When the ideas in your brain start coming out better on paper and canvas than they were in your head," struck a cord in me. That's the stuff that I want to get to. Jeff's philosophy, articulation and approach to learning the craft lead me to signing up for the Watts courses. That was in April 2016.
Not long after, I signed up for the boot camp, as a self-motivating trick to get myself to draw more, to be ready for the boot camp. I began to draw more than I ever had before, working in the charcoal pencil technique that Watts instructs. It was a style of drawing that I resonated with very much. I also came to know that most of my life I was only dabbling in art. Never had I studied how to draw a hand and learned it inside out so I could draw it intuitively. Rather, I had only drawn 50 or so in my whole life. I looked through all my drawings and this was the case. More and more I was overwhelmed by the amount of practice there needed to be done to get to where Jeff was pointing. And yet having Jeff as a coach through each lesson was continually motivating, as he commented on all the sides of what I was observing as I started to become more serious and focused with my practice.
As it came closer to the course, I had talked to Jeff a few times on the phone and I was very excited for being able to talk about more philosophical things when we met. Also, it dawned on me that I had never had a really good artist draw over my work to help me understand how to make it better. It was extremely humbling as I continued to practice and understand just how much Jeff and the other teachers of Watts Atelier must have practiced to get to where they are. Representational art is hard, there is no question about it. Gradually, I could feel the momentum of getting better, of practicing and of understanding how to go about practicing.
From listening to Jeff, I understood that eight days is not much time for learning art, but it would be a time to get some better understanding of where I was at in terms of being intuitive and consistent with my craft and how to continue practicing with intelligence. That is exactly what it was, and so much more.
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