Blind Artist - Tumblr Posts
how does your blindness impact your art? I would have thought that it would be impossible for a blind person to work in a purely visual medium like you do, but clearly that's not the case. do you use adaptive tech or specific styles/techniques?
(I apologize if this question is ableist. I would like to know more about your experiences, but I don't have a great grasp of what's appropriate to ask and what isn't. I am not trying to be rude.)
Oooh thank you for asking! :) For the record, I’m pretty chill, I know there aren’t exactly a ton of us blindies out there, so feel free to ask questions with the language you have. :)
Haha oh man, my blindness has impacted my art from the very first thing I drew at age 4. I have a small amount of vision in my left eye; no depth perception, no peripheral vision, no distance, pretty good colors though. Life to me is basically a smear of nonsense colors that I put meaning to through context and location. The closest thing to seeing anything clearly I’ve ever gotten was watching cartoons, which I did obsessively as a kid. So first and foremost, I don’t and can’t draw from life, it makes no sense to me. The bold, simple actions of animation and the heavy stylization has taught me a ton.
Over the years my style has become very much about being high contrast, high visibility. But it also tangles with my love of doing pretty intricate detail work (it’s soothing, what can I say XD). In the past I was strictly a traditional media artist and I drew with what I had on hand. Growing up in poverty, what I had was the pens I used to write with in school and the paper I scrounged out of recycling bins. I basically mashed my face on the paper and worked in light angled over my shoulder that wasn’t too bright. I clipped paper to clip boards so I’d always have something lightweight enough to hold in one hand while I drew with the other. I’d sketch in pencil and ink using my very beefy prescription reading glasses, and everything I do had to be self taught. Life drawing class just doesn’t do anything for the dude who can’t see the model. :D
In 2019 a botched cataract surgery cost me most of my functional vision. I can no longer read print for any length of time, I don’t watch tv, and increasingly I just forget to look at most things with my eyes. But! I have an iPad. :D It took a few years and finding a pair of beefy store bought readers so I can focus enough to draw, but using Procrate and zooming down to the pixel as well as sketching on a black background makes the art still possile. I still draw mostly the same way I did with traditional media. I know brushes could probably be used to make some things easier, but I don’t have the spoons or visual stamina to figure out how to use them except for making quick backgrounds (pro tip: never have your character or object floating in a white void, even a single line to ground them will make your work better).
Color of late has been an interesting thing because I literally do not understand how light and shadow really works. I’ve read up on it but there’s only so much anyone can do when they just can’t see the thing. I like to ink the best and color is just an experiment I’m trying every time I do it heh. I make up little rules of style for myself and do a lot of guesswork based on the full shape I think a thing or character has, if that makes sense. I don’t know how a lot of things work visually so I will make stuff up, guess, or you’ll see some funky style things that happen because I read a medical paper once and just like drawing the holes in an iris (that’s what the lines in characters’ eyes are heh).
I’ll have to make a video sometime. Some of this stuff probably makes more sense in action.
Tl,dr: I mash my face onto an iPad and use 35-ish years of drawing experience to guess at what leoks right. :D I don’t think I would have become an artist if I wasn’t blind, I would have had more to look at to distract me. XD
This may be a duplicate ask because Tumblr may or may not have eaten my first attempt.
1 - When did you start creating art?
3 - What are your favorite subjects to draw? (OCs, your fan faves, etc.)
5 - What piece of art are you still proud of to this day? (Show or describe)
8 - How would you describe your art style?
20 - What motivates/inspires you artistically? (topics, emotions, etc)
from this ask game
Thank you for such an extensive ask! I wasn't expecting that! :)
Somewhere around 4 years old. Realized people could draw things after a preschool trip to a doctor's office that had a human heart diagram and I never stopped. :D
3. Favorite subjects can vary. Usually it's whatever I'm hyperfocused on at the time. :D I always love drawing my OCs though. They're designed specifically to be fun for me to draw and they are. :D
5. I'm always kind of proud of things I've completely forgotten about but when I stumble on them again months/years later it's like "oh hey, wow! That's pretty good!" Many of them I can't share here for Reasons but I enjoy being able to do work for clients that is not of personal interest but which I can do so well that people assume it is. At random, I just opened my art folders and this early digital piece from 2017(?) is pretty rad! That border was all hand drawn because I could. XD
8. I always say I'm a cartoonist with a specialty in character illustration.
20. I read so much nonfiction and watch a lot of documentaries and it all sort of soaks into my sponge-like brain, swirls together, and falls out as some very trippy "yeah, but what if...?" ideas. :D I get the occasional greatly weird idea from dreams too. A lot of it is just making a shape with arm and going off of how something feels to draw; a simple line swish becomes the angle of a face or the direction of a body in motion. And of course I get constant inspiration from straight up misinterpreting the world around me, for both physical and mental reasons. Being almost totally blind means that what reality looks like is very subjective and there is so much I encounter that I don't even recognize for what it is, which translates to fun ideas for art. Combine that with ADHD and I am never without an idea or twenty. :D I like to say art is "advanced fidgeting" for me: if I can't draw or write or imagine, my brain starts to feel literally itchy and I don't like it. XD
@lilac-the-void-pup I tried drawing blind so my girlfriend would realize she could still learn even with her disability! I thought I'd share it so others could be motivated. It wasn't really a detailed drawing, I just wanted to cover the basic forms of everything, but I drew everything either blindfolded or squinting really hard so it blurred my vision. I might draw this oc again with vision and give them the same visual impairments as her