Well, whattaya know! The Great Bluegrass Festival Drawing Expedition was a blast. Despite my fears at venturing into public drawing, I sketched unscathed at the Good Old Fashioned Bluegrass Festival. Musicians didn’t take offense at my sketching: bass players didn’t mow me down with their gigantic instruments; fiddlers didn’t skewer me on their bows, nor did banjo players strangle me with their twangy metal strings. And the people who looked at me (yes, they did. They actually looked at me with my little journal and bag of pencils) while I drew, why, they were delighted! One woman saw me drawing, grinned widely and said, “what fun is that!”

And darn it, it is fun. Normally I dislike listening to music while I work. I find it distracting—one of the uncomfortable things about being a musician is that there is no background music. My musical brain always stands at attention for anything resembling music, and disallows any action by the other thinking parts of my brain. I am not a good multi-tasker when music is playing.

But this was different. For one thing, I was prepared for music.  I knew there would be lots of it. Besides, I wanted to sketch musicians while they played.

One thing I learned. Bluegrass really sets your toes tapping and makes your drawing arm swing.

It was really hard to sketch people as they played. Those musicians are moving all the time, and each drawing was an exercise in fast gesture poses—good practice for me. You can see that the drawings weren’t entirely successful, especially around the hands. And even less successful around the instruments.

I point out the unsuccessful parts because drawing at this festival really made me see the areas in which I have smaller knowledge, the parts of the world that I need to really look at and understand. That means concentrated study.

To draw a form rapidly, and draw it well, I think you need study it. It needs to be in your head already. You have to study forms so hard that you can trot out a hand, a foot, a face, a fiddle, and draw it perfectly from memory. Once you’ve internalized it, then I think you can really accomplish something.

Again, it’s the analogy of musical scales. You’ve got to get those major and minor keys down so you can shift between them at any turn of the tune. Then you can really start to have fun when you play with other people.