by Henk ter Heide on Monday May 4, 2009
I was planning to draw a preserving bottle, but after starring it down for a moment I decided that would be to complicated for right now.
So I thought I go for something easy like the television that is sitting about a meter from me on it’s cupboard. But that drawing turned out to be deceptively complicated.
Because I’m sitting only a meter away and part of the television towers above me the perspective plays strange tricks: I never noticed but the corner that is facing me seems almost twice as high as the corner that is facing away. Which looks very strange in the drawing.
The slots on the site of the television also behave strangely. The top one is on eye level so it seems straight although it isn’t. It’s curved just like the bottom one. The same is true for the ventilation slots.
I won’t even start about how strange the cupboard looks.
It’s strange feeling. Having a photographic memory I feel that I know how the different parts of the world connect to each other. But trying to draw them it’s almost as though having a photographic memory for shape is something of a disadvantage.
Wasn’t expecting that.
Television on cupboard
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by Henk ter Heide on Sunday May 3, 2009
It’s a strange feeling to sit and stare at a vacuum cleaner for a few minutes. But it is the best method to figure out how the lines run and what the relationship is between the different details of the vacuum cleaner.
Now I’m doing this I finally realizing why I’ve always had so much trouble drawing complicated pictures like this one. I have a tendency to imagine the world in three dimensions. I know, by heart, which lines are running towards me and which lines are running away from me.
But to draw them I have to learn to imagine them in two dimensions. Lines don’t run towards me or away from me but under a slight angle upwards or downwards to the left or right.
Half way through the drawing I realized that I had placed the vacuum cleaner to far away to get a good view on some of the details. Since it is not possible to move the vacuum cleaner without changing the angle and/or the perspective. I was forced to simplify the drawing somewhat. Which in the end turned out to be a good thing.
This type of vacuum cleaner has a lot of ornaments that don’t have anything to do with it’s purpose. It’s nice to look at but it doesn’t necessarily make the drawing better to understand.
Vacuum cleaner
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by Henk ter Heide on Friday May 1, 2009
It’s getting a bit boring to draw only chairs. So this is the last drawing of this chair. But not the last ink drawing.
This time I didn’t use the single line rule. I lifted the pen as often as I needed and I must say that this drawing is far better then the last few. The perspective of the backrest and the armrests is almost correct.
But then the legs in the last drawing where a little better then this one.
Still I feel I learn something with every ink drawing I do. I think that tomorrow I will do my vacuum cleaner. I have a Dysons with nice curved lines.
Last chair
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by Henk ter Heide on Sunday October 12, 2008
Wandering why my perspective are always wrong when I draw a picture from my mind.
While doing my last drawing something happened that I never had before. Or at least I’ve never realized this.
The brown band at the right of the drawing is supposed to be a wall. While drawing it I realized that I didn’t know what was on the other side of that wall.
I’ve always had the feeling that I knew everything that there was to know about the objects I see in the pictures in my mind. But apparently not.
Thinking some more about this I realized that the pictures in my mind are not only 3 dimensional but I also have multiple viewing points. I literally what both this side and the other side of the tree look like. Which is why I have such a hard time to draw it. Since it is impossible to draw both side all at ones.
The reason that I know what both sides of an object look like is probably because I walked around it. Which also explains why I don’t know what is on the other side of the wall in my drawing. Probably this is a picture I saw somewhere on a picture postcard or on television.
Staring some more at my last drawing after I had scanned it I started wandering why it looked so much different from one of the first drawings I did after I started this blog last year. I copied a landscape from some picture and it looks very nice and 3 dimensional. Where as picture I draw from memory always look flat.
It took me a few days but it finally hit me.
Even though the picture in my mind are 3 dimensional I don’t see perspective in those pictures. I get them 3 dimensional by comparing the hight and width of everything to my own hight. I know how far I would have to bend my neck backwards to see the top of the tree. I know how deep I would have to dig down to get to see all the roots of a tree.
But there is no way for me to draw myself into the picture. So to get a feeling of depth I will have to use the language of perspective.
Perspective
There is also something wrong with this drawing. More specific there is something wrong with the tree.
It only took me a few hours to realize that it’s the same problem.
I relate the thickness of the trunk and the branches to myself. The trunk is as thick as I am and the branches are as thick as my arm.
Without myself in the picture I’ll have to find an other way of judging size.
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by Henk ter Heide on Saturday August 23, 2008
Stairway to haven
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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
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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
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by Henk ter Heide on Friday August 15, 2008
524
This is turning out to be a far more complicated drawing then I imagined. And this isn’t even the picture I had in my mind. That means that there is at least one more picture I’ve to draw after this one to practice before I can get to the picture I wanted to draw.
Allowing myself to draw complicated drawing over a period of a few days and scanning partial drawings turns out to be a very good idea.
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by Henk ter Heide on Wednesday January 30, 2008
One other table and chair. This time with a little more interesting perspective.
Thinking a little more about my last drawing I thought it should be possible to do more interesting things with a table and a chair.
This table is a little bigger which makes it possible to put the chair at more interesting angle.
It took some figuring but I think the perspective of the chair came out all right.
The only thing is that I was so buzzy thinking about perspective that I forgot to look at the composition of the drawing. As a result the legs of the chair are a little short.
Box table and chair 2
BTW Some one pointed out to me that I shouldn’t post to many links to my Twitter account.
I must admit that I got a little carried away with this new tool. Posting to Twitter is so easy I kept going on and on.
That said. Twitter does offer the possibility to subscribe to an RSS feed. Either of my Twits or of all the Twitters you are following. So you can read every twit on a time of your choosing.
I will try to contain myself. Little more quality and less quantity. But there will always be days I’ll post more then others.
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by Henk ter Heide on Monday January 28, 2008
Drawing a table and chair and solving some perspective problems.
While scanning my last drawing I realized that something was wrong with the angle of the seat. But I didn’t understand how that could be.
Using a box to show me the perspective means that I’m, in a sense, making two drawings. One of a box and one of a chair.
I hadn’t realized that I should check the perspective of the box before I start with the chair. If I forget to do that it becomes impossible to go back and correct it.
I was a little nervous seeing as I thought that this would be the most complicated drawing since I started with perspective. And it was.
After drawing the table it took me a while before I realized that a drawing not only can have multiple vanishing points but that it makes the drawing more interesting. Nobody lines up his furniture perfectly so you shouldn’t draw it that way.
I also had a little problem with point of view. What can I see from where I’m standing?
It took me a while to realize that I can’t see one of the legs of the table because the chair is in front of it.
What you can and can’t see seems very obvious until you try to draw it.
Box table and chair
This will be my last box drawing for a while. I’m getting a little bored with it. At some point I’ll have to get back at it but for now I’m going to concentrate on cylinders
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