by Henk ter Heide on Tuesday June 2, 2009
A few days ago I wrote that I had to get some things out of my system before I could really concentrate on drawing. I even started with an article about unemployment.
But now I’m feeling that isn’t it. Maybe it’s just that I don’t yet really know how my process works.
This morning I realized what the problem was with the drawing I was planning. It was not, as I was thinking, that the different parts of the drawing could present problems. It was the drawing it self.
I had printed a photo of some beautiful actress with blond hair that I was planning to copy.
The problem is that I don’t copy.
It’s like I’m making a kind of choice. Only it isn’t a choice.
The choice would be that I rather make a bad original drawing then a good copy. But that is not it.
It’s more like I can’t force myself to copy anything.
It doesn’t matter what good reasons there might be for making a copy (getting practice, feeling safe). I just can’t do it.
Maybe I should just accept that while I’m switching to this, relatively, new interest I’ll draw when I have something to draw. The rest of the time I will fill with thinking about it and searching for beautiful art to fill my web pages.
Anyway. About todays drawing.
I bought Jack Hamm’s book about drawing land and seascapes and found that it’s almost the opposite of his book on portrait and figure drawing.
Where the book on portraits starts with almost no theory and a lot of pictures of body parts to copy. The book on landscapes starts with 20 pages of theory on composition.
And what a theory. I’ve been drawing and reading about drawing and painting on and off for the last 30 years. But Hamm teaches me more about composition in the first 8 pages then I had learned up till now.
Since business is slow at my job at the moment I took the book to work and forgot to take it back home for the Whit weekend. So Saturday when I had a little time I couldn’t read the book but I could think about what I have read.
The theory is that you should not put your subject in the middle of your frame. Well you could if you wanted to. But you’d get an interesting picture if you don’t.
At first I started thinking about holiday snapshots.
Let’s say you want to photograph a family of five in front of a large old oak.
The most obvious choice would be to line the family up with the oak behind the person in the middle. And shoot them head to toe with the tree trunk showing above the head of the person in the middle.
But you’d get a much more interesting picture if you have the tree behind the second person in the line.
Shoot the people head to middle with a little more then a quarter of the frame showing either the sky or low hanging branches.
Or so it is written on page 5 of the book. Page 6 and 7 talks about catching the eye of the audience in a circler motion by putting interesting feature of the drawing on specific lines.
This drawing is an attempt at that.
EyeSee
by Henk ter Heide on Wednesday March 18, 2009
This isn’t the most beautiful drawing I’ve ever done. Actually this might be the most ugly drawing.
It’s kind of an experiment.
After concluding that I’m more interested in color then in shape this seemed a logical first step to take. No shapes, no colors. Just blobs of black on a white paper.
This is not what I had in mind. But that’s the point to draw something I don’t have in my mind. Something that’s also new to me.
First step
by Henk ter Heide on Saturday August 23, 2008
Stairway to haven
by Henk ter Heide on Tuesday August 19, 2008
The advantage and disadvantage of drawing less perfect.
My experiment yesterday to draw while tired taught me an important lesson: Either the lines are perfect or the overall picture is perfect. Never both of them.
In trying to get every line perfect you invest a lot of time and effort. So much so that you will never say something like “OK, now I know what I want, lets start over”.
You can’t after investing all that energy.
I’ve started my drawing again and very soon found why I’ve never tried this before.
There is something very frightening about drawing and going for imperfection intensifies that fear. Even if you have a photographic memory and a visual thinking process, like I have, you don’t exactly know what you are going to draw until you’ve finished your drawing.
You never know whether you’ve drawn something you like until you’ve finished the drawing.
Going for imperfection feels as though you’re setting yourself up to fail.
And it’s quite possible that you are going to fail.
Actually it’s almost certain that you’re going to fail since this is only a sketch.
If you find that you like what you’ve drawn you will have to start over to make it a genuine drawing.
As scary as this way of drawing is, in this case it’s also more educational then trying to get every every line just right.
This time I started out with a kind of framework by drawing a line of squares from the down left corner to the upper right corner. The idea is that the steps in the upper right corner are higher.
Which is fine but in drawing the rest of the steps I find that they don’t exactly fit. I have to figure the logic of the drawing out the make it fit.
Since the point of this drawing is to learn to understand perspective it’s a good thing I have to think about it.
Stairway to haven
by Henk ter Heide on Monday August 18, 2008
I’ve never dared to draw when I’m tiered or intoxicated. Since I see every detail I always felt that if I wasn’t at my very best I would make a lot of mistakes. Mistakes I either would have to correct later on. Or I would have to through the whole drawing out.
But things have changed. Yesterday I decided that I should try to draw a bit faster because I was getting bored with this drawing and because it’s only meant as a sketch. Today while cycling home from work I though it would be a good idea to find out what happens if I draw while tired.
Turns out that drawing fast and while tired is a very good idea. It seems to change the way I look at my own drawing. Less critical.
I don’t think I’m making less mistakes then usually. They just don’t feel that important.
563
by Henk ter Heide on Sunday April 6, 2008
Trying to get a natural white color.
Ever since I started drawing I’ve been thinking about how I could draw white surfaces. The problem being that I don’t have white pencils in my box and I want the surface to look natural white instead of paper white.
I’m not sure whether there is a difference between the two but it does feel that way to me.
While practicing hatching a while back I had an idea how I could get a kind of natural white in a black and white checkered marble floor.
The idea is that the color of the marble isn’t constant all over the surface. In some areas people walk a lot causing a lot of wear and tear. Closer to the wall where less people walk the colors are more clear.
With hatching you can give the black tiles a nice dark color.
To get the kind of walked on feel for the white tiles I tried a little blending. Using a large folded piece of kitchen paper I started with the darkest tiles to get the kitchen paper black. Then I used the kitchen paper to color the white parts in the walked on area.
checkered floor
The drawing didn’t work out the way I pictured it in my mind. Hopefully that’s just due to lack of skill and I will get it better the next time I try something like this.
Their is a up side though. For this study I had to do a lot of hatching and I find that my technique is improving.
by Henk ter Heide on Tuesday February 26, 2008
Continuing my hashing practice.
A few days ago I found that it is quite difficult to draw straight lines while hashing. Today I filled a grid with only short straight lines and showed some progress.
It’s a lot easier to get the lines straight when you draw them fast. Which results in the new problem that it is much more difficult to stop the line in time. I tend to either over shoot or stop to early.
I have to practice a little more.
One thing I did find is that it is easier to work away from yourself then towards yourself: Being right handed I tend to work from left to right. That way I get a good few on the lines I’ve already drawn.
But for some reason I found that with drawing short straight lines it’s actually easier to work from right to left. Even though that means that you can’t see the earlier lines that well because you are blocking your sight with the pencil.
Gray scale hashing 3
BTW I also figure out why I had the problem that white paper after scanning looked pink.
I found that if you don’t use the gamma control the white turns a little gray. If you do use the gamma control the white turn pink.
Apparently you should only use gamma control when you have colors in you drawing.
by Henk ter Heide on Monday February 25, 2008
Trying to get an even color by hashing.
Usually when I draw with color I find that you get to see a lot of lines. I’ve never been able to spread the color evenly over the paper. But yesterday when I was hashing with gray pencil I found that I could spread the pencil evenly about the paper.
So today I’ve tried whether I could get the same kind of result with color pencil.
I’m not completely satisfied. Although you can’t see it very good in the scan I still see a lot of color variation within one square.
Quite possible that it’s just a case of getting enough practice. So I went back to hashing with gray.
Here I also found that the gray scale varies within squares. But I stayed within the lines.
Color hashing 2
by Henk ter Heide on Sunday February 24, 2008
A few drawings to practice hashing.
Just like I expected yesterday I’m starting to get some idea about what it is that I want to accomplish by practicing hashing.
I’ve decided to start out with practicing with gray pencil. For one thing because gray pencils are cheaper than color pencils but mostly because I also want to be able to draw with gray pencil. As I look at drawing by other artist I get the impression that hashing and cross hashing are more important techniques with gray pencil then with color pencil.
For the first run I started out with at random putting some hashes (is this a word?) on paper. It didn’t feel that difficult.
Gray scale hashing 1
After filling a large part of the paper I thought that it might be nice to draw a grid and fill that with hashed lines.
Gray scale hashing 2
This turned out to be a little more of a challenge. It’s quite difficult to stay within the lines.
I tried to hash half a square and then the other half but run into to problem I have had earlier. The two half hashes tend to overlap which means that there is a part in the middle that is darker then the rest. (Line 2 row 4.)
The only solution seems to be to work with very long lines. But axectly the right length. Not so long that you over shoot the outer line and not so short that white shows.
For the corner squares I didn’t want to hash. The problem with hashing at the edge of the paper is that you overshoot the edge and get stuck on your way back.
Instead I wanted to draw parallel lines but that caused it’s own problems.
There are several techniques you can use to draw short straight lines but none seem to have a very good result.
One option is to rest your wrist on the table and use your fingers to guide the pencil. But if I do that I get a wobbly line.
The other possibility is drawing from the shoulder. But then there are also two possibilities that don’t work very good. You could draw very slow but if you do the line tends to get slightly rounded instead of straight. Or you could draw a lot faster but then you tend to overshoot.
(Which isn’t a problem when you are drawing at the edge of the paper but usually that won’t be the case.)
Clearly I’ll have to do some more practicing of both the hashing as the drawing of parallel lines.
by Henk ter Heide on Monday February 4, 2008
Some more free hand circle drawings.
I wasn’t satisfied with the circles I drew last time, so I did some more. Here are 2 of the 4 sheets with circles I did.
It turns out to be very hard to draw consistent round circles. But after some practicing I found that the easiest way is to start making a circular motion in the air and then lower your pencil onto the paper.
And for some reason larger circles are easier then smaller ones.
Freehand circles3
Freehand circles5
But my circles are still more oval shaped then round. I’ll have to practice some more.