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 Thursday May 14, 2009
I sketched some left eyes. Wasn’t very difficult.
I found that the shape of eyes is a little different then I thought. I always understood that eyes were almond shaped. Which is true but apparently the outside corner is a little higher then the inside corner.
Could be. Although it seems to me that the last eye is tilted a bit to much. Seems a bit Chinese. But presumably you can see it better when you draw a face around the eye.
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by Henk ter Heide on Monday May 26, 2008
Starting in a new direction.
Last year when I started this blog I gave myself the assignment to learn the skills needed to draw the pictures in my mind. Although I’ve been hard at work and indeed learned a lot of skills I have had the nagging feeling that I wasn’t succeeding. I wasn’t satisfied with my results.
The last few months I’ve been thinking about my last drawing and about some of the artsites I reviewed. I realized that the problem is that I’ve been concentrating on learning skills necessary to draw the right shapes.
Turns out that I’m not that interested in shapes. I’m much more interested in colors and in rhythm of colors. The way colors blend together to give you an impression of the world.
For my next drawing, I decided, I would concentrate on color instead of shape. And then I did nothing for something like a week. For some reason it seemed very frightening to do this drawing.
It took me a while to figure out why.
Until now I’ve always relied on my photographic memory. Even with the few abstract drawings I did I had a clear picture in my mind of what I was going to draw. Granted I didn’t always succeed in drawing what I wanted but I always knew what it was supposed to be. But not this time.
This time I only knew that I would probable use the colors blue and gray and I knew that I wanted to draw undefined shapes. I had no I idea what the drawing would look like when I was finished
I hoped that this drawing would give me some ideas about the next one.
Orange fish
It did give me some ideas about the next one.
While drawing I realized that I could get a very nice effect if I were to start in one of the corners.
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by Henk ter Heide on Wednesday May 7, 2008
Describing the art work of Stephen Whatley and David T. Wenzel.
I have several tools to find art work on the Internet. One of them is simply using my Google reader to look at pictures from Flickr. This if by far the easiest method and so I feel that it should yield the most interesting sets of pictures.
But sadly every body on Flickr is an artist. Which means that I have to scour through hundreds of pictures to find something interesting.
This set of more then 200 paintings by Stephen Whatley is certainly one of the more interesting.
Looking at his paintings it’s clear the Whatley finds color much more importaint then shape. His paintings of people, buildings and flowers are drawn in just enough to show you what he’s showing. Using a lot of yellows and reds and other colors he tells the rest of the story.
If you want to learn more about this artist visit him at his website
My heart by Stephen Whatley
Mountain of man by Stephen Whatley
Following the link to the website of David T. Wenzel you’ll find dwarf pulling a rope. At the other end of this rope hangs a T swaying in the wind. Clicking “enter” you’ll get to a very complicated contraption with a few menu options below it.
Move you mouse about the menu and see what happens.
The “portfolio” and “currently brewing” options will give you several very nice fairytale like drawings and illustrations.
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by Henk ter Heide on Friday December 7, 2007
Learning to draw the real shape of an object.
Tonight’s drawing isn’t one of the assignments of the book but something that I tried for myself.
I’m right in the middle of a very long and theoretical part about composition. Although it is important and I certainly learn from it. It seems to go on and on.
A few months ago I tried to draw a kind of topographic face. That was because the pictures I remember are in 3d. But drawing topographically turned out not to be much of a success.
According to the book a lot of people have problems with the fact that they know that the object they try to draw has a shape that is very different from the shape they see.
Chairs have a sitting area that is big enough for your bud. Not that thin line you’re looking at. But if you want your drawing to look real you have to draw what you see and not what you know.
To help figure out what the shape of an object is, the author introduces negative and positive space.
Positive space is what’s left of the door after Bugs Bunny has run through it. Negative space is the shape that is gone.
(Although to me it seems that should be the other way round, but that’s just me.)
Looking at the positive space it should be much easier to figure out what’s the true shape of an object under the angle you see it.
Actually I should have drawn a gray shape with white around it. Gray for the shape of the chair and white for the surroundings. But I liked it better to just draw the chair.
Negative chair
The only thing is that although it a reasonably nice drawing there is something wrong with it and I can’t figure out what.
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by Henk ter Heide on Wednesday October 31, 2007
While trying to draw a hand I discover that shade shapes.
The book “Drawing with the right side of the brain” instructs you to draw three drawings before you receive any instruction to create a kind of base line. That’s because people tend to forget how bad they were. At the end of the book you can take these drawings to compare and see your progress.
For the third drawing the assignment was to draw the hand you don’t use for drawing. So for someone who’s right handed that would mean the left hand. But after posting the picture from which I drew yesterday I thought it would be nice to also post the picture from which I draw today. So I’ve made a picture of my right hand holding a pencil and drawn that.
Drawing a hand turns out to be a little more challenging then drawing a portrait.
There’s not much that can go wrong with a portrait. There are a few distinctive feature that should be present. But they have very clear shapes.
But that’s not the case with a hand. If you only draw the shape you end up with something out of a comic book.
But of course I didn’t know that when I started with this drawing. I kept the lessons of the last few days in mind and withstood the temptation to start with some detail.
I started out by drawing the shape of the forefinger and thumb. The rest of the hand and a little piece of the arm. Then I wanted to draw the middle finger and run into a little problem.
You can’t actually see the shape of the middle finger in the middle of the hand. You can see a little piece sticking out. But that’s about it.
It’s gets even more complicated when you try to draw the ring finger. You know it’s there but you can’t see it.
This problem left me no other choice then to try to draw shades.
Starting out with the shade where the ring finger should be. Since that’s about the darkest part. Then came the folds in the forefinger and the lighter parts that show the curve of the finger.
After that I noticed a nice dark shade under the pencil.
The tips of the fingers that stick out under the thumb where very hard to draw until I realized that the shade made them stick out. By leaving a little white you can even see the white of my nails.
All in all, although not perfect this drawing is a lot better then I had expected it to be.
Right hand drawing
The picture from which I drew:
picture of righthand with pencil
After thinking about it for a bit I decided that this drawing should go in my Favorite drawings list.
There is kind of a difference between this drawing and the other in that the others are finished and this one is much more a work in progress. Or to say it an other way. If I had to do it over I would draw the other favorites just the same. In this drawing however there is a lot of room for improvement.
That said. If I compare this drawing to my first drawing I see a lot of progress. Something to be proud about.
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by Henk ter Heide on Monday October 29, 2007
Fulfilling the first assignment of “Drawing on the right side of the brain”.
As I mentioned a few days ago I’ve bought Drawing on… That is, actually I wanted to buy an other book about drawing but Amazon advised to buy this one as well. As such things go, I’m now reading Drawing on… and the book I wanted to have, will have to wait for a while.
It’s not only that Drawing on… is a famous book but after reading a little bit I found that the main theme comes close to something I’ve been experiencing over the last few months.
When I started drawing I thought I’d just draw the pictures in my mind but in trying I’m finding that I have to change the way I look at people and objects:
A few months ago when I was drawing faces I found that although I did have a general idea of how faces looked I didn’t know a lot of the details. When I started drawing clouds I experience that again. I did know what a cloud looked like. But when I wanted to draw it I found I had to do a lot of cloud watching to find out what they actually looked like.
To recognize your own progress when you’ve finished with this book the author starts out with a few assignments to find a kind of base line.
The first assignment is to draw a selfportrait by looking at yourself in the mirror.
But my only mirror is bolted to the wall in the bathroom. Which is a great to comb your hair but not for drawing. So I’ve used the picture I used on my about page. When I printed the picture out I found that my color cartridge had run out of ink. So I had to print it in b&w. Which probably made the drawing a little easier.
Selfportrait before
Although I’m not sure whether I would recognize myself from this drawing, it’s a lot better then the drawings I did a few months back.
With the older drawings I tried to start with a small detail and then work to the big picture. But it never quite worked. I found that I run into vector problems: Only being a few degrees off in the angle between the eyes and line of the nose meant that the mouth was off by miles.
This time I started as you should. By drawing the hair line and the shape of the face. The hair line gave me the placement of the eyes. The eyes gave the placement of the shades that make out the nose. Then it was logical to go on with the shades that make the cheeks. I almost forget to draw in the mouth.
I found that I had to draw the background in to be able to draw the ears. Because the ears are very light. They stand out against the black background.
One other thing I just noticed says something about the importance of looking.
After I had done my older drawings a friend of mine remarked that I should pay more attention to the ears because they were different. She thought that it would be impossible to have two different ears.
But in actual fact it isn’t so much the shape of the ears that you are drawing. It’s the shape of the ears under the angle that you’re looking at that you draw. In this picture you can see slightly more of my right ear. Partly because my head is slightly turned to the left and partly because my hair hides my ear.
So my two ears are slightly different in the picture and I tried to draw them slightly different.
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by Henk ter Heide on Monday June 11, 2007
It took several sketches before I realized that there was something wrong with the way I use my colors. I make parts of the face darker that should be lighter.
Topographical face final sketch
It seems that I have some kind of synthesis between touch and sight. While I look at something I also “feel” it. When I try to remember how something looks the shape is the most powerful memory.
I thought it would be nice to try to draw a face the way I see it in my mind. Like a sort of statue with thicker (darker) and thinner (lighter) parts. But it isn’t. It’s boring to look at. This is the second and final drawing using this concept.
But it has given me some ideas about the relation between landscape and portraits.
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