by Henk ter Heide on Sunday May 17, 2009
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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by Henk ter Heide on Tuesday December 9, 2008
Two weeks ago I almost stopped drawing.
After trying to draw trees, landscapes, faces abstracts and using the teachings from two book it was more then clear that I don’t have any drawing talent what so ever.
It was also clear that I had to go through far more trouble then I planned when I started this blog. I just wanted a place were I could show the pictures in my mind in the same way as that other people show there holiday snapshots. They don’t have to take a course to learn to use there camera so why would I get so much trouble trying to do the same.
That was the point I reached two weeks ago when my involuntary holiday started.
Almost at ones I started noticing a few things. The talking in my head stopped without there being a clear reason why. I found that the more I thought in pictures the less the pain bothered me. (Which was a good thing because the pain medication didn’t work very good.) And I noticed that the moment I started thinking in pictures, I again felt the need to draw them.
At this moment I actually feel the need to spent far more time drawing then I’ve ever done.
It took me a while to figure out why.
A few weeks ago I came across an article about a book in which Malcolm Gladwell argues that there isn’t such a thing as talent.
From extensive testing scientists have found that there is a correlation between the number of hours that people have practiced a skill and there level of expertise. Or more specific that anyone can get to be an expert in any skill if he is willing to practice for 10,000 hours.
But that’s also the catch. 10,000 hours is a very large amount of time. To reach it you’d have to practice 7 hours a week for the next 10 years. Or 14 hours a week for the next 5 years.
For me it answers an other question that I’ve been asking myself for years: Why is it that experts always love what they do? Is that because they are very good in what they are doing?
No it isn’t. They are experts because they love what they do.
Start playing the piano when you’re ten. Practice two or three hours a week and by the time you’re 30 you will be very good. But nobody will think of you as talented because you’ve been doing it for 20 years.
But if you’re the kind of guy for whom drawing is the reason to get out of bed in the morning. The kind of guy who fails his tests because he was busy drawing and didn’t pay attention. It could very well be that by the time you drop out of school at your 15th or 16th you are considered a talented painter (or tattoo artist).
But why is it important for me to know this? Well I have two kinds of pictures in my mind.
A large part of the pictures in my mind are based on what I see of the part of the world in which I travel on a daily bases. Those pictures feel like snap shots and I need an easy way to show them.
Although it took a while I have found an easy way to show them by showing work by other artist. The world in which they live doesn’t differ that much from mine that I can’t use them to show my world. (Or actually if they do I don’t show them.)
Then there are the pictures of my own thoughts. Those pictures are far more complicated and I never expected to just show those pictures. It’s clear that showing my thought would be far more complicated.
The more complicated pictures take far more time to draw.
Until now I hardly ever drew them because I felt that they would come in the way of learning the easy tricks needed to show my snap shots. But now I know that isn’t true.
By taking more time to draw more complicated drawing I’m learning far more. Which means that I can draw ever more complicated thought.
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by Henk ter Heide on Wednesday August 13, 2008
Thinking about drawing in my future.
A few weeks ago Steve Pavlina wrote something that was both very obvious and very true, but I had never thought about it.
In essences he wrote that time passes. In ten years, ten years will have passed. Which is obvious.
He continued to say that in ten years you will have gathered ten years of experience. Which is also obvious but I never realized that.
In ten years time I will have gathered ten years of experience in what ever it is that I’m doing.
If I spent the next ten years watching TV and doing video games I will have gathered experience in watching TV and gaming. Which is not something I aspire to.
But if I spend only 15 minutes a day drawing. In ten years I will have done thousands of drawings and gained a lot of experience.
Of course when I read this I was in the middle of my blind spot (maybe if I name it I’ll recognize it next time) and I didn’t know what to draw.
But I figured that even if I where to draw gibberish (521-1) I still would be gaining drawing experience. Or at least I would get into the habit of drawing daily.
Having thought some more about it I now feel that it would be nice to spent somewhere between 15 minutes and one hour a day working either on drawings or writing reviews. Because it usually takes more then one day to finish a drawing and I do like to show what I’m working on I’ll be scanning half drawings.
This also led me to a problem I have been running into before. What to name drawings?
I imagine that famous painters like our Rembrandt didn’t name every sketch and experiment he drew. It is getting rather trying to find an original title for every drawing I do especially if some of my drawings will only be gibberish.
The easiest way around this is to number them. And so I don’t get confused I’ll just use the number WordPress gives an article if you don’t name it.
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by Henk ter Heide on Saturday March 22, 2008
I’ve found a better way to practice hatching. More fun to do and more fun to look at.
Hatching shapes
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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.
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by Henk ter Heide on Saturday February 23, 2008
Making a decision about the future of this blog.
I’m finding that I’m slowly getting to a point of which I naively thought I would never reach it.
When I started this blog I thought that I would be drawing beautiful pictures without ever having to practice technique. Since I have a photographic memory I thought that I only had to draw what I saw.
But it doesn’t work that way. To draw what you see you need a fair amount techniques I don’t have.
So a few weeks ago I spent a few days drawing circles. I didn’t blog about it because I thought it wouldn’t be very interesting if I blog about the same subject 10 days in a row.
But last week I didn’t do any drawings and I remembered that there was an important reason why I started this blog at about the same time as I started drawing:
I need a way to publish my drawings. Even if I’m only do boring practice drawings I still need to publish them. If I don’t I get the feeling that I’m doing something that is without purpose and I stop doing it.
So I’ve gotten to the point where I have to take a decision both about drawing and about blogging. Either I stop doing both or I continue practicing my drawing and write articles that probably will be rather boring.
A few months ago I would probably have chosen the first option but in the last few months I’ve noticed that my readers are very picky. They only read the article that are of interest to them and ignore the rest. So I think I could get away with writing 10 articles about freehand circle drawing without any one noticing it.
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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
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by Henk ter Heide on Friday December 28, 2007
Trying out a new approach to drawing with color pencil.
Ever since I started, I thought about drawing with color pencils as though it was a cross between Rembrandt and the way Bob Ross painted.
I thought that to get a nice picture I would have to cover the paper with a thick layer of pigment just like Rembrandt did. I puzzled with the problem that using color pencil you can’t start out with dark colors and put lighter color on top the way Bob Ross used to do.
Although I like most of my color drawings I always had the feeling that something was off.
A few days ago I came across a video tutorial about painting with water color. The main reason for watching it was to see whether it was suitable to link to from my StumbleUpon account. But as it turned out I did learn something from it.
The maker of the video advised people to always start out with the lightest color and then work there way to the darker colors. She also showed a little practice painting to show what she meant.
It suddenly dawned on me that drawing with color pencils is much more like painting with water colors then it is alike to painting with oil paint.
Here is my interpretation of the practice but then in color pencil.
Color practice
I clearly used to many different colors. I must try a more minimalistic approach.
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