Beware of details (Sketch: Chair)

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I got a little bored with only drawing my left hand, so I decide it would be fun to try the same technique on the chair I drew a few months ago.

But that turned out to be a little harder then I imagined. In drawing my left hand I started at the left side and worked my way to the right. Which was exactly what I tried with the chair. But for some reason the result was that the pillows got about ten times as big as they really are.
I thru two sketches out before I finally realized what I was doing wrong.

In drawing a hand you don’t have bother with details. All the fingers are about the same size. So it doesn’t matter that much were you start.
But in starting with a detail of the chair I made it very difficult to estimate how much bigger the pillows should be. To make matters worse, the pillows are at an angle. Which means that if you draw the angle even a few degrees off the pillow gets very much larger.

This time I started with the back of the chair. That’s the widest part of the chair. Since every thing else is smaller it’s a lot easier to estimate the size.

Chair

There’s only one thing I wonder about.
I’ve been reading further in the “brain book” and the author suggests to use a right-angled cut-out to frame the picture you want to draw and a piece of plastic to draw on. That is, draw on the plastic while looking through the plastic. Which means that you’re in fact tracing the chair on to the plastic.
It seems that even a famous painters like Vincent van Gogh used some kind of frame when he was learning to paint.
I use neither.
Does that mean that I’m very good at drawing? Or does that just mean that I’m kind of stupid?

Tagged as: b&w, betty, brain, Drawing, edwards, furniture, Pencil, sketch