Artists' Rules?

When I was young, my art teacher told me not to use rulers when drawing straight lines. She gave a lots of "rules" that a great artist must not do this and that. The brush stroke must not be repeated, use stick figures to establish the proportion... etc. Most importantly, I must not trace!

While my position is that, all those are bullshits! We learn to do better job by tracing! One thing in me which is similar to Leonardo da Vinci is that I am an engineer, at the same time, also am an artist. Over the period of time, people developed new techniques and methods to do something better! Even Leonardo himself learn from tracing, and he even recorded his method of tracing in his Codex Atlanticus!

In this modern day, hyper realism has been made possible with the photographic technology. Modern artists has moved towards other non-traditional mediums and technique to express their artistic ideas in modern contemporary form. Thus, I don't think the traditional rules still applies!

Back in the days when I was in primary school, a part time art teacher once put me in a difficult position because she suspected that I traced a Daisy Duck painting. She asked me to draw the same picture on the black board with calked. She probably do not understand that to draw in a piece of A5 paper is a lot easier to get the proportion right compare to drawing on a black board. Further more, I was short and I couldn't even reach some part of the black board. My life and experience in art has been a hard and discourage one since very young age. In the end I couldn't get the proportion aesthetically on the black board compare to the one I get on a small A5 piece of paper. Whereas the original print is actually an A4 size, which I use the small box dividing technique I learnt from an art studio in Karamunsing Building. She rejected my work in the end, punishing me for "tracing" an art work.

Art should be the wings of freedom! It should be a form of an expression. Other than speech, and texts. Why put such unnecessary rules on it to kill the human creativity!?