Drawing: Copying and Emulation

This is my fourth blog post and it's about emulations and copying, which holds a vast amount of benefits to anyone that is getting started with drawing. The differences between copying and emulations is copying is just like drawing the exact image as a masterful artist by tracing over the image or drawing the images based on observation. And emulations is drawing a similar things a artist has drawn, but it's like adding your own little twist on it or like changing some key differences to make the images your own so, you still had a very similar experiences in making that piece of art as the original master artist.

Copying:

The basis of copying and how it works can be described as the types of experiences you have when you're in a room with someone with much higher skill than you but, because of their high skill it also drags you along with them and make you tremendously better at that skill. So, the example Dodson gave was his friend was right behind a good skier and she just felt dramatically better at skier just in the presences of the master (Dodson 56). So, basically with copying you're going to go through the feeling and sensation of the master artist when copying their piece of artwork. And being able to just experiences what the professions feel can really help a beginner to understand the mind states of the artist they're copying by like questioning why the artists are making these very exact strokes and they get the feel the "handwriting" the artist use to develop their own sense of style.

Emulating:

Emulating even though very much like copying, but is basically going one step higher than copying to create you own piece of artwork that can have inspiration from all sorts of master artist. The most important benefit of emulating is the acquisition of your own handwriting which is basically your "style" or like certain technique that you develop to make the artwork specifically your's. Dodson said basically by observing and studying an artist that you like then, you'll slowly get the sense of handwriting and develop your own based off their already acquainted handwriting (Dodson 57). Developing your own "handwriting" is important for drawing because it's basically how you differentiate your sense of drawing from another person's which makes drawing really special since everyone can have a different way of drawing something and all of they can end up looking spectacular. Also, the feeling of creating your own artwork based another artist's established handwriting just enables you to developed your own feeling and sensations for each stroke you make and every line you place down. Overall, both methods just really an artist developed their unique sense of style or "handwriting". 

The picture to the left is my emulation of a character. And it really improved me personally since, I'm more into drawing cartoony characters and just emulating the artist just really helped me established my own sense of style.

Questions: What other applications do you think copying can enable a person to improve upon a skill? 

Source: Dodson, Bert. Cincinnati: F&W, 1990 Print.