by Henk ter Heide on Monday May 18, 2009
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
by Henk ter Heide on Friday January 30, 2009
Cuban man
Posted on Flickr by binkie9
portrait of a woman
Posted on Flickr by Jade M. Sheldon
Like Soccerman
Posted on Flickr by Andrey Off
by Henk ter Heide on Tuesday May 27, 2008
Paintings by Marco Bucci and Billy George.
At Marco’s Stuff you’ll find a nice collection of portraits and funny paintings.
Halloween eyeball by Marco Bucci
Billy George paints a lot for animation films and video games
Ruined earth 3 by Billy George
by Henk ter Heide on Tuesday October 30, 2007
Drawing a portrait from a picture instead of from memory.
For the second assignment of the “Drawing on the right side of the brain” book I should have drawn a portrait from memory. But being autistic I found that I can’t remember the eyes of anyone I would want to draw.
So instead I drew an portrait of a photograph I had lying around.
As I understand it the goal of the exercise is to find your “symbols”. Symbols are little piece of drawings you have learned as a child that guide your drawings. So if you at one time have learned to draw eyes as two concentric circles with the one on the inside colored and the one on the outside blank you will keep doing that the rest of your live. There by degrading every drawing you will ever make to a child’s drawing.
Being autistic should give me a little edge in this respect. I don’t remember where or when but I have a vague recollection of reading that one of the problems of autistics is there inability to think in symbols.
Boy in swimming trunk
Here is the picture from which I drew.
by Henk ter Heide on Thursday May 24, 2007
I’ve been reading the weblog of Steve Pavlina for the last two years (or so). Although he can be a bit to new agie at times he also writes a lot of articles I find really interesting.
Over the past two years I have saved several articles planning to get back to them and do something with them. I never did.
The problem is that a lot of those articles are about things like setting goals and having priorities. But I never quite got what the relationship was between those two. I did understand the logic of applying priorities to the things you find important to get the things you want. But I never got what kind of goals would lead to what kind of priorities.
Apart from the dream of having a half a million Euro drop in to there laps people hardly ever talk about there goals. They do talk about there priorities but to me it always seemed as thought they (wanted) to spend a lot of time doing things I really don’t want to do: Going to the movies with your boy (girl) friend, having a career. (A few years ago while I was trying to improve the working conditions within Promen I was told that I’m very ambitious. Am I ambitious?)
Yesterday Steve finally wrote an article about the relationship between goals and priority: “You want to make the greatest amount of progress towards your goals with the least amount of effort.”
While reading this article the penny dropped. Setting goals is about what I want. Setting priorities is about getting the things done I want to have done. And since I’m autistic I need different things then most people.
So what is my goal? My goal is to reach a situation where I can live as a kind of a reclusive and talk with as few people as possible.
What do I need to reach that goal?
Not having a job. There is no way you can have a job and meet colleagues and not talk with them. I’ve tried. They always think that you’re in a bad mood and try to brighten your day. Which in my case just causes a bad mood.
To live without a job I need to find a way to earn at least €1500 a month after taxes.
When I started this weblog it was meant as a way to publish my drawings. Drawings are my voice. Drawings are the way I express my self. Not having a way to publish them would be like giving a speech to an empty room.
Although I’m not all that in to brandnames I did want to have a Google search engine on my site. I wanted one on my last site and I search high and low before I found out that the search engine is actually meant to earn money. I never quite understand why I’d wanted a Google search engine but now I do. Having a Internet landmark on my site is a way of giving it a bit of structure to my site. It’s not something I’m doing for my visitors but for myself 
.
After a while I also decided it would be nice to have a “donation” button. Not that I expected to earn a lot of money with donation button, but it would be a nice way for people to let me know they appropriate my drawings.
Having a goal will change the whole layout of my life. I will get to make different choices, do different things. A whole new way of living.
Art
Today’s drawing is a bit experimental.
Topographical face 1th sketch
by Henk ter Heide on Saturday April 28, 2007
Yesterday I enthusiasticly searched for a dozen picture of people to draw. A picture of a boy in a swimming trunk in a shower of some swimmingpool didn’t look to difficult so I started with that one.
But me being me I can’t just start with the big picture. I have to start with some detail and…
I’m not sure what will happen next. I thought that I might draw a lot of pictures of details and then work my way up to the big picture.
But it seems that I’m going to zoom out.
Layering of colors gives a very nice result but it is a very strange way of drawing.
Yesterday I started with a yellowish brown as back color. But that turned out to be to dark. Which means that the darker parts of the face get to dark.
This time I started with a yellow. But as you can see this yellow is to sharp. It hurts your eyes.
Ai ai
I’ve started a new drawing with a less brightyellow.
At first I thought that layering would mean that I’ld have to draw the picture dozens of times with different colors. A bit like what you would expect of silk-screen print. But that is hardly possible. That would mean drawing the nose in yellow next to the cheeks in yellow above the mouth in yellow.
How would I see the difference? If I can’t see where the nose ends and the cheeks begin how would I draw the next layer? So I decide to lay a foundation of yellow and draw the next layers.
by Henk ter Heide on Tuesday April 24, 2007
A while back I discovered that if you put several layers of different colors on top of each other you get a very nice variation in colors. The only problem is that contrary to painting when using pencils the colors are a bit unpredictable.
Yesterday I found that if you layer colors with different tones the result is much more predictable and you get that feeling of depth which is missing when you only use one color.
Nice lips
In this study I’ve tried both techniques. Using blue to darken the shades isn’t working out. But I’m especialy proud of the mouth. In both lips I used a layering of three colors. In the upper lip one orange and two reds and in the lower lip an orange, a red and a purple.
I’m just wondering if I didn’t mix up the shades. Shouldn’t the lower lip be the ligther one?
by Henk ter Heide on Sunday April 15, 2007
CSI daddy
The trouble with starting with a detail is that it is very easy to loose site of the proportions. The last face I made seem to have a very small mouth compaired to the nose. This face is better in that respect.
I had some problems with the chin line and the hair line. Especialy the chin seems to be a lot larger then it ought to be. It gives this man kind of a brusque face. He actualy had much more of a gentle face
by Henk ter Heide on Friday April 13, 2007
You see superman take a doorknob of a car and instead of opening the door he will tear the door out or even lift the car. The same thing happened in the first superman movie with Christopher Reeve. Half way through the movie a chopper falls of a roof and superman saves it by grabbing the undercarriage.
Student on That’s the question
In both cases I would have expect the doorknob or the undercarriage to break off. But that didn’t happen. But since this was a movie I suspended my disbelieve and took it for granted . The idea seemed to be that if you have one part of an object, you have the whole object.
My drawing works a bit in the same way. On a drawing course you learn that you should begin with an overview of the object and then fill in the detailt.
When drawing a face that means that you start out with the eyes, then the eyebrows, the nose, the mouth and the rest of the face. All the time while you’re concentrating on a detail you keep an eye on the big picture.
I’ve tried that but it doesn’t work. Although the drawing I get is about as bad as this one it just doesn’t feel right. So with this drawing I’ve tried begin with a detail.
The little peace of shade just left of the right eye (for the onlooker). From there I drew the eyebrow and the nose and then filled the eye in. After that came the left part of the nose and the eyebrow of the left eye and the left eye.
As I said, the drawing isn’t that much better. But it felt like this is the way I should draw. Starting with a detail and working to the big picture.
by Henk ter Heide on Tuesday April 10, 2007
Having a photographic memory also explaines some of the other strange things I come across:
Shopping lists.
Why would you bring a shopping list?
While I’m in the shop I look in my cupboards to see what I need.
Sometimes I will forget to look in a particular cupboard but people who make shopping list also sometimes forget to check a cupboard.
A few weeks back I had to work on an other department for a few days. So the head of that department left his office for a moment to look round in his department to see what kind of work he could offer me. How could he not know what kind of work his department offert? But I also see people walk to there kitchen to see how much sugar they have. How can you not know how much sugar you have?
To big or to small
But the really strange things are phones with built in camera’s and holiday snapshots. Why do most phones have built in camera’s? I never quite got that one. Why would you want to make a picture of something while you were using your phone? Nore did I ever understand why people spent so much time and money making holiday snapshots. My father used to spent hours sorting his snapshots and then sticking them in photo albums. Then the whole family had to watch them and tell my father how beautiful the snapshots where. But they never where.
Now I understand.
After a holiday I have kind of a movie in my mind of everything we did during that holiday. That movie gets more vague over time but even years later I still have a three dimensional full color picture of the places we went.
When I look at pictures I can usely remember the moment the picture was taken. The activity that had to be interupted so everybody could line up for the picture. But even if I wasn’t present when to picture was taken I can remember a picture after seeing it for less then a second. So I tend to flip through a picture album in no time flat.
After I’ve watch someones pictures he is offended because I didn’t appreciate his pictures. I never understood why I should take more time then I need just to give him the impression that I do appreciate them.
