Fulfilling the first assignment of “Drawing on the right side of the brain”.
As I mentioned a few days ago I’ve bought Drawing on… That is, actually I wanted to buy an other book about drawing but Amazon advised to buy this one as well. As such things go, I’m now reading Drawing on… and the book I wanted to have, will have to wait for a while.
It’s not only that Drawing on… is a famous book but after reading a little bit I found that the main theme comes close to something I’ve been experiencing over the last few months.
When I started drawing I thought I’d just draw the pictures in my mind but in trying I’m finding that I have to change the way I look at people and objects:
A few months ago when I was drawing faces I found that although I did have a general idea of how faces looked I didn’t know a lot of the details. When I started drawing clouds I experience that again. I did know what a cloud looked like. But when I wanted to draw it I found I had to do a lot of cloud watching to find out what they actually looked like.
To recognize your own progress when you’ve finished with this book the author starts out with a few assignments to find a kind of base line.
The first assignment is to draw a selfportrait by looking at yourself in the mirror.
But my only mirror is bolted to the wall in the bathroom. Which is a great to comb your hair but not for drawing. So I’ve used the picture I used on my about page. When I printed the picture out I found that my color cartridge had run out of ink. So I had to print it in b&w. Which probably made the drawing a little easier.
Selfportrait before
Although I’m not sure whether I would recognize myself from this drawing, it’s a lot better then the drawings I did a few months back.
With the older drawings I tried to start with a small detail and then work to the big picture. But it never quite worked. I found that I run into vector problems: Only being a few degrees off in the angle between the eyes and line of the nose meant that the mouth was off by miles.
This time I started as you should. By drawing the hair line and the shape of the face. The hair line gave me the placement of the eyes. The eyes gave the placement of the shades that make out the nose. Then it was logical to go on with the shades that make the cheeks. I almost forget to draw in the mouth.
I found that I had to draw the background in to be able to draw the ears. Because the ears are very light. They stand out against the black background.
One other thing I just noticed says something about the importance of looking.
After I had done my older drawings a friend of mine remarked that I should pay more attention to the ears because they were different. She thought that it would be impossible to have two different ears.
But in actual fact it isn’t so much the shape of the ears that you are drawing. It’s the shape of the ears under the angle that you’re looking at that you draw. In this picture you can see slightly more of my right ear. Partly because my head is slightly turned to the left and partly because my hair hides my ear.
So my two ears are slightly different in the picture and I tried to draw them slightly different.
Comments on this entry are closed.