by Henk ter Heide on Tuesday March 2, 2010
For years every time I felt home sick I would imagine myself roaming the halls of my old boarding school. While I walked through those halls I could remember them very clearly. Three dimensional and in color.
I always assumed that I had such a clear memory of the place because it made a big impression on me. It was only a few years ago, after I had discovered that I’m autistic, that I realized that I can remember every thing so clearly.
I not only have a clear, thee dimensional, color image of every place I’ve ever been. But also of every place I’ve ever seen on TV on in the movies. Even places I’ve only seen in my imagination after having read a description of them.
So for the last few years I’ve been thinking that it should be possible to visit places in my memory. Like a way of getting through the day, if I have less then interesting work.
But it never worked for much longer then a minute.
After about a minute I would feel very tired and start talking to myself.
Apparently for some reason I didn’t really understand, visiting the images in my memory took a lot of energy. I just couldn’t keep it up for very long.
So every now and then I try it. But I have never had much luck visiting images until yesterday.
I’m not sure why. But since yesterday I can visit every place I want to visit.
The main difference seems to be that I can now recognize why it’s difficult.
Turns out that visiting places in my imagination evokes very strong feelings in me. Almost to the point that I can’t stand them.
Now I recognize this it’s clear to me that I’ve had this before. Only thing is that until now the feelings where so strong that I couldn’t even feel if they where good or bad feelings.
I only had the feeling of burned out circuit.
Now I recognize the feeling as something good I can visit any memory I want to.
So today I’ve been enjoying a few childhood memories. And the strong feelings that accompany them.
I’ve even remembered the sandbox we had in our back yard when I was about 6.
If you like the stories I tell. Or like the art and music I show. Feel free to leave a donation.
by Henk ter Heide on Sunday January 6, 2008
I started working from the book “How to draw what you see”.
There is something contradictory in what I’ve been taught as a child.
On the one hand I’m taught to go by my feelings. If something doesn’t feel right it probably isn’t.
But on the other hand I’ve also been taught that you should be able to explain why you do the things you do.
You either have to do what everybody does or you have to explain yourself. Not doing either will get you in trouble. In those case you’re told that you should just tough it out because your parents and teachers know what is best for you even if you feel it is not.
But of course not knowing that I was autistic I came about a lot of instances where I knew that something was wrong but I didn’t know why. Running into a brick wall I was told to just go on trying. Not succeeding in something meant that I didn’t put enough effort into it.
It could never mean that my feeling that something wasn’t right for me was right.
Amazon advised me to also buy “Drawing with the right side of the brain” when I wanted to buy “How to draw what you see” by Rudy de Reyna.
“How to draw…” is one of those books that assumes that people know how to look and see details and only concerns it self with teaching techniques to draw. (That contrary to “Drawing with the right side of the brain” that teaches you how to see details as a first step and drawing them as a second step.)
After my painful experience yesterday when I found that I run into problems with “drawing on the right side…” because I see more detail then is expected by the book I decided to go with my gut. Instead of working from a book that wants to teach me something I already know I should work from a book that teaches me things I don’t know.
Rudy de Reyna thinks that the world is composed of four basic shapes that can be seen in every thing you see around you: The cube, the cylinder, the cone and the sphere.
If you concentrate on these basic shapes you are half way through your drawing: A tree is an long cube with cubes attached, an ice cream cone is a cone with half a sphere on top.
Of course you’ll have to draw in details to get a tree or ice cream cone but the basic shape is there.
De Reyna starts of with a very basic assignment. So basic I have never thought of doing it. But in doing it I immediately saw the worth:
Drawing straight lines is something you’ll will have to do in every drawing you do.
And I have done some straight lines and every time I do I get annoyed by the fact that they either aren’t very straight or aren’t parallel to some other line I drawn.
In practicing straight lines I found a few things.
- Contrary to what I believed drawing lines straight down isn’t the easiest method. For me it’s much easier to draw right to left. (I’m right handed)
- Again contrary to what I believed. To draw a line parallel to an other line it’s easier when I draw the second line above the first line instead of below.
- Drawing with speed is easier then drawing slowly.
That drawing a parallel line is easier when you can’t see the first line (because you’re covering it with your hand) really surprised me.
It turns out that when I can see the first line I’m so distracted by trying to make the two lines parallel that I forget to draw the line straight. When covering the first line with my hand I concentrate on where I want to end the second line. Then I just draw and the line gets much more straight.
Here is the exercise I did.
All the lines are drawn right to left and I turned the paper as needed.
Of course I have to do this exercise some more. All the lines in this exercise are in close proximity of each other were as in real drawing they tend to be further apart.
In this exercise I tried whether it would be easier to draw a line parallel to an other line while looking at that line or while covering that line. But in real drawings you some times don’t have that choice. You have a first line and need to draw a second were the drawing dictates.
Drawing straight lines exercise
If you like the stories I tell. Or like the art and music I show. Feel free to leave a donation.
by Henk ter Heide on Friday May 25, 2007
Hard to soft
When I was in my early teens I found an old tennis racket and a few tennis balls in the garage and I played some tennis for a while.
Looking back it’s a bit strange that we’d have a tennis racket since I can’t remember one of my parents ever playing tennis. Actually I can’t even imagine one of them playing. It might be that my mother tried to get me to play with other children.
Anyway I started out with hitting a ball against a wall. I was very good at that. I could aim the ball at a specific point on the wall and get it straight back. I hardly ever had to step left or right to hit my ball.
After doing that for a few weeks my mother suggested that I should join a tennis club which I did. From that point the problems started and very soon I lost all interest in the game.
At first we started with learning how to hit the ball over the net vaguely in the direction of your opponent. That was easy since that was what I’d been doing for weeks. The only difficulty was not to aim up.
Within a few weeks my teacher decide that I could go on with the next step. hitting a ball that was thrown from the other site of the net. Again this wasn’t very difficult. The trouble was that I lost the ability to aim. I’d hit every ball but they went all over the place. Mostly up. Almost every ball I hit went over the five meter high fence designed to keep balls in.
Even when I tried to do the game I started with, hitting balls against a wall, they went up on top of the building. Soon I run out of balls and lost interest in the game of tennis.
I haven’t hit a ball since.
If you like the stories I tell. Or like the art and music I show. Feel free to leave a donation.
by Henk ter Heide on Monday April 30, 2007
In primary school I ones had the assignment to draw a branch of mistletoe. At that time I didn’t yet know that I mainly look at details and how I should deal with that. So while I drew the details of one side of the branch I didn’t look at the other side. When I drew the details on the other side I didn’t see the one side.
The result was that the branch got wider and wider. I didn’t like that drawing very much. My teacher did.
After that I only drew this kind of pictures. Save pictures that weren’t supposed to look like something. Back then I only used two colors.
Intersecting bottles
On the Click show a site was featured where they showed how to draw portraits of famous people. One of the technique he shows was the use of tortillons.
Tortillons are conical shaped pieces of pressed paper that are used to blend colors.
I drew this picture to play a little with the tortillon and so see what I can do with it.
If you like the stories I tell. Or like the art and music I show. Feel free to leave a donation.