A few lovely pencil drawings by Burdge bug
A different kind
Aim
Hazy
Daddy Edward
Arnold approves
Merry Christmas
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Pencil
It does seem to be possible to control the colors while I’m color hatching and still get some interesting colors.
Of course this drawing is only a proof of concept. Doesn’t look like much, does it.
Turns out that there is a way to get the colors to interact. I can use either the lightest yellow or the white pencil to blend colors.
If I use yellow to blend blues I get a lot of green colors.
If I use white something happens. Not quite sure what.
I have to do some more experimenting to find out.
Color hatching 1
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My fountain pen is gliding over the paper. Up, down, up, down.
I love to watch while the black is slowly consuming the white paper. I could do this all day.
But I won’t.
If I just paint the whole paper black there isn’t much to look at.
But I would want to…
Then comes the hard part.
Although the colors I get with this color hatching technique are beautiful. They are also completely unpredictable.
I don’t like things that are unpredictable.
The shorter the lines, the more colors I use, the more unpredictable and beautiful the result.
Or I can begin with a layer of some color and then place a few lines on top. That’s far more predictable but not as beautiful.
I’m mostly fearful of my next few drawings.
I want to try to make kind of a landscape using my new color technique. But I’m not sure how.
If I can’t predict the colors how can I get them to interact?
Love and fear
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For the last few years I’ve been playing a kind of game with my self. I look at an object; a tree, car or park bench. And while I’m looking at it I try to imagine it.
Doing that feels as a kind of memory practice.
That is, I’m not sure whether I’m improving my memory. But it feels like that.
The problem until recently was that it also invoked a very strong feeling. So strong that I never knew whether it was a good feeling or not.
But a few weeks ago I noticed that the feeling had changed. It’s still a very strong feeling and I still don’t recognize it. But I’m now sure that’s a good feeling.
So the last few weeks I’ve been looking a lot. At everything around me. At everything I would want to draw.
And I finally realized something that’s probably obvious for people who are not autistic. But I never saw it.
The background of an object is very important.
A tree is nothing without the park or forest it belongs to.
The reflection of an early morning sun in a black wet road is nothing without the trees and the cars that surround it.
So for the last few weeks I’ve been thinking about how to draw background. Specifically about a color pencil drawing technique I read about years ago where you hash colors together.
In this study I’m finding out how you can mix colors.
I’m finding that the nice part of this technique that you can’t actually predict what kind of colors you’ll get after mixing a few colors.
I’m must try this on a somewhat larger scale.
Color islands
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It’s a good thing that keeping a new years resolution is a process and not an act. Otherwise I would have failed it already. Yesterday I did draw for more then an hour but I didn’t come around to writing this article 
Ah well. Here it goes.
As my regular readers will have noticed, I haven’t done anything for some three months.
I had found that I couldn’t make the pictures I wanted with color pencil and had decided that I would start painting.
I had bought oil paints, an easel, a pallet and the lights I needed to photograph my paintings. I had even painted a few test panels.
And then everything halted.
It just stop.
I didn’t feel like painting any more.
I assumed that I would start painting again at some point. So I just waited.
The thing is that I have had this happening before. Often even.
I have had a lot of times that I am in the middle of some activity and for some reason just don’t feel like finishing it.
It used to annoy the hell out of my mother. She thought it meant that I was too lazy to finish my chores. (Although I never quite understood why she thought that joining a tennis club would be considered a chore.)
Over the years I learned that halting some activity for no apparent reason and then picking it up again a few weeks or months later, or figuring out what is wrong with it, is just part of being me.
So I waited.
The only thing that had me slightly worried was this blog.
This blog is linked to drawing and I felt that couldn’t keep all of you just hanging there. Not knowing what had happened.
I hate it when I’ve followed a blog for a few months or even years and it just stops. And I never find out what happened to the author.
Did he move on to other activities? Did he die?
A few weeks ago I started thinking that I should write some kind of brief explanation about why I wasn’t writing anymore. But a funny thing happened.
While I was thinking about how I should explain that this happens to me some times. That I didn’t know why I had stopped and didn’t know whether I would ever continue. I figured out why I had stopped.
Even better.
After I had realized why I had stopped, new ideas started flowing. And before I knew it I was drawing again.
I thought it would be best to first do a few drawing, to see if it would stick, and then tell you about my developments. But the drawing I’m doing right now is taking far too much time to do it that way. Although I drawn for more then an hour a day for the last week. I’m still only at about two thirds.
But still I feel curtain that this direction is so rewarding that I won’t stop after just a few drawings. I don’t feel that I have to test myself by finishing yet an other drawing before talking about it.
Why did I stop painting in September?
When I started thinking about it, it turned out to be fairly obvious.
I had lost my direction. I had lost my purpose.
When I started drawing early 2007 and started with this blog I had a very clear purpose.
I wasn’t trying to produce beautiful drawings. I was trying to find a way to express myself via drawings.
Being autistic and having a visual thinking process I find that I have to work very hard at expressing myself.
Before I can tell anybody anything about the people I meet and the places I go. I have to translate from the pictures and movies in my mind to words I can speak.
Although I’ve become quite good at it over the years, it’s still a lot of work.
Which means that I can write an article like this one, which is perfectly understandable.
But sitting on a stool in a bar I can either relax or talk with people. And since I go there to relax I never talk very much.
Lately a few of the costumers of my favorite bar have figured out that I’m quite knowledgeable on some subjects and they question me about them. And when they do, I answer them.
But it always feels like an interview. Never like a conversation.
To me conversation are just to much like work.
Three years ago I thought that since I have this visual thinking process and a photographic memory, it should be very easy to find a way to draw those people and places that I wanted to show the world.
But it wasn’t.
Using color pencil I quickly found that the pictures I drew never looked like the pictures in my mind.
For two reasons.
One of which turned out to be very obvious, when I finally thought about it. The pictures in my mind are of a photographic quality. Pictures I draw never are. Which, I suppose, is the charm of drawings. But it wasn’t what I had in mind.
The other problem is that I have a field of vision of 180 degrees. Just by the size of the paper that I’m using, a drawing is only about 30 degrees. Which is probably why a guy like Stephen Wiltshire draws such detail on such big canvases. It’s the only way to get the world in your drawing.
When I moved to painting I just assumed that I would solve both problems.
Bigger canvas would mean drawing a bigger part of the world. And since you can layer with oil paint you can indeed get more photo realistic pictures.
The one thing I hadn’t counted on was drying time.
With oil paint you can layer different colors on top of each other. But after each layer you have to wait until it’s dry. Otherwise the different layers will mix and everything will turn a foul color of brown.
Drying time can be as much as two or three days.
So imagine what that means.
No doubt you have seen those beautiful portrait paintings where the artist has put a little dot of white paint in the pupil of the each eye to suggest life.
Those two tiny dots of white paint take three days to paint.
That is a few seconds for every dot. And then three days of drying time before varnish can be applied.
(And after that the painting has to dry out for several months before it can be used.)
There is no way that I can work that way.
Most painters work either from postcards or from sketches they have made.
I didn’t want to do that. I wanted to draw/paint the pictures and movies in my mind.
I started out with the pictures because it seemed easier to learn. But to really show the world what I’m all about I have to draw/paint the movies.
But of course they change over time.
There is no way for me to keep an image in my mind for the several months it would take to finish the painting.
The first painting I wanted to do was a simple one of an apple tree in bloom in an English landscape.
I’ve been wanting to do a picture like that for as long as I’ve been drawing. I could never find a way to do it with color pencils.
But even such a simple idea keeps changing:
Will I put the tree in the foreground or the background. On a hill? Against a blue sky or a stone wall?
And that are only the questions I ask myself.
The color arrangement also changes. But that isn’t something I consciously think about. It’s just the way the world around me changes.
When the sun shines the pictures in my mind have all kinds of bright colors. When it’s an dreary day the pictures in my mind change to low hanging fog. And then at night I “see” a lot of greys and blues.
There is no way I can show my world using paint.
But even if there was. It’s far the much work. I was looking for an easier way to show my world then by translating the pictures in my mind.
This is far to difficult.
So without realizing what was wrong, I had reached the end of this path.
This is turning into a very long article.
Tomorrow I will tell you about this new direction I have found
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It used to be that clocks where those big, almost statue like, objects standing in the middle of the room. Heavy weight pulling chains, moving cogs, moving time.
If you stared at them long enough you could see time flow.
Then came the electrical clock,
his minute hand jumping from minute to minute.
Time moving faster and faster.
Now we have digital clocks and time has stopped flowing.
It has become some kind of calculation.
I started this project at 12 noon and finished it at 14.33. So it took me 233 minutes….
233 minutes?
Flow of time
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This was a very hard drawing to design.
Going with the theory of important lines within a drawing to catch the attention of the audience. This was meant as a kind of minimalistic design. In a sense to see how empty a drawing can be and still be interesting.
The idea was for one leaf on the sidewalk. But to make it more interesting I wanted to change the size of the tiles. I spend a few days thinking about the best size for the tiles (and being busy with other things). But when I finally had time to make the drawing I couldn’t.
It felt as though something was wrong but I could put my finger on it.
After a boring day of playing computer games I realized that I had made a mistake in the design and had no problem drawing it.
Lines and leaf
Probably you’ll have seen what the problem is.
These kind of tiles they use on the sidewalk have a fixed size of about 25 * 25 centimeters. And everybody knows that.
As an artist I am allowed to change reality in any way I feel will make my drawing more interesting.
But the trick is not to be caught. Since everybody knows the size of sidewalk tiles the leaf will seem very large.
I have thought of an other design using both a sidewalk and leafs. But that’s for the next drawing.
Commenting this and my last drawing
Although it’s not really a problem with this drawing. Again I had a problem drawing the right side and the left side of the leaf symmetrical.
In this case it’s not really a problem because I shaded and it seems as though part of the leaf is lifted from the ground.
I realized that the problem is that I’m not very good in drawing curves that run from right to left. So I’m tempted to start with the curve running from left to right. Which usually is the right curve. (I turned the paper to draw the leaf). Then when I try to draw the left curve my hand covers the right curve and I can’t see what I’m doing.
Might be a good idea to start with the left curve and see how it goes.
The goal in doing EyeSee was to test the theory that putting interesting features on specific lines would trap the eye of the audience in a circular motion.
But although I did like the drawing I didn’t feel that my eyes were trapped.
It wasn’t until after I had posted the drawing that I realized that the problem was with the background.
As in. There is no background.
The point is not to draw attention to features on specific lines. The point is to help the audience find interesting features in the drawing by guiding there eyes.
For instance a row of trees in a landscape could guide the eye to a few interesting houses. Or interestingly colored clouds could guide the eye to a mountain range.
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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
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This is the first picture in the book by Jack Hamm. Although this is a very bad copy of the picture it’s actually the best face I’ve ever done. Because I now have kind of an idea as to how mouths and hair are supposed to look when you draw them.
The only thing is that it’s not much fun to copy a drawing by some one else.
I think the next thing I’m going to do is print out a bunch of famous faces and try to draw them.
Looking at the drawing I see that I still have a problem with getting the left and the right side of the face symmetrical. At least in part this problem has to do with the fact that I cover the right side of the drawing with my hand while drawing the left side.
Maybe I should start with the left side…
Posted on Flickr by Henk ter Heide
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After discovering yesterday that I had problems with the shape of one of the eyes I had no choice but to practice it.
I found that I was wrong. It’s not easier to draw the eye from the outside corner to the inside corner. It’s easier to draw it left to right and learn to control the pencil enough to get the shape you need.
It does mean that I cover the guiding dots with my hand. But I found that if I imagine the shape I want it works quite nice.
In three sessions during the day I filled two sheets with eye shapes. I was planning on doing a little more but the eye shapes are reasonable regular right now. And this practice run is rather boring.
Eye practice 1
Eye practice 2
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