by Henk ter Heide on Tuesday July 14, 2009
Autistics don’t doodle.
I’m not sure why. But now I’m thinking about it. It’s probably something to do with the subconscious.
As I understand it doodling is when your hand moves subconsciously about the paper while your mind is otherwise occupied.
Autistics don’t have a subconscious. Or so I’m told. So no subconsciously drawing while listening to people at some meeting.
But subconscious or not I find doodling a very interesting process. Mostly because you don’t know what you’re going to draw before you start.
For the last year or so I have the feeling that it’s something I should try me hand at.
In a way because it’s the next logical step.
I’ve tried drawing from my photographic memory. But that became boring long before I got skilled enough to really show what I wanted to draw.
Then I tried my hand at a kind of projects where I thought of a picture before I started. Without it being something from RL.
But still it gets stale long before I get around to drawing the picture.
So the next logical step would be to start drawing without knowing what I’m going to draw. But that’s scary.
That I’ve been putting it off for more then a year proves how scary it is.
Or does it?
Thinking about it the other day I realized that it actually only proves one thing: I’m prone to procrastination.
And of course procrastination creates it’s own feelings. The longer you put something off the more frightening it gets.
But that doesn’t mean that doodling is scary.
From reaching that point it was only a small step to realize that my actual problem is a kind of writers block.
I’m afraid of that blanc sheet of paper staring at me. Waiting to be filled.
But there’s actually a very good method of getting through writers block called “Free writing”.
Just start writing.
Doesn’t matter what you write about.
Maybe a note to the milkman. Maybe only repeating words. Really doesn’t matter. Just start and go on for 30 minutes a day. Daily. For a few weeks. And at some point your writings will become meaningful. (To you.)
Free drawing would be doodling.
So that’s what I’m going to do for the next few weeks. And I must say I have high expectation as to what kind of drawings I will be doing in a few weeks.
After doing the first two I find that I’m not really doodling. I’m putting far too much thought in to the process. They’re more like a kind of quick sketches.
Even so. I think I’m going to learn a lot from doing a few of these a day for the next couple of weeks.
img052
img053
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by Henk ter Heide on Thursday May 14, 2009
I tried my hand at drawing an ear. Jack Hamm’s book helped me to get some feel about the general shape an ear should have (img040). Then I search for a photo of an ear and tried to draw that.
I found that I have the tendency to use to dark lines while sketching. The problem with that is that lines have two purposes. Not only do they mark the edge of the subject, the ear in this case. They’re also used to show ridges by representing shades. When you use to dark lines to mark edges it looks like there is a ridge where there should be none.
Yesterday I said that I figured out how shading worked. Today I tried it again.
It’s kind of a trick.
I find that I have two modes of looking at a drawing. In the one mode the drawing is flat and darker and lighter areas are just that. Darker and lighter areas.
In the other mode the drawing becomes 3 dimensional and just by looking at the ridges it becomes obvious where shades will be cast and which areas should be darker and which should be lighter.
The trick is to switch from one mode to the other when your drawing needs it. A few days ago I did that by accident and it felt like an epiphany. I didn’t even know it was possible.
Today I couldn’t get it to work so I had to do it the old fashion way: Work on something else for a few hours and when you return to your drawing you’ve switched.
Then you can see what you actually drew. You can think about what you should do with your next drawing but you can’t actually work on the drawing.
img040
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Posted on Flickr by Henk ter Heide
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by Henk ter Heide on Tuesday April 28, 2009
As I wrote yesterday I tried my hand at some single line ink drawings.
The rules for single line drawings are very simple. You may double lines as often as need be, but you may never lift the pen of the paper.
If you do the drawing is finished.
So I did the first drawing yesterday. It’s of about the same setting as the color sketch I posted yesterday. Except that I also had put my sweater on the chair.
The drawing looks alright but of course being a pile of towels and a sweater gives such a jumble of lines that you can’t actually see what it’s supposed to be. So it would look alright.
The second drawing I did just now.
I won’t go into everything that is wrong about it but you can see that it’s supposed to be an office chair.
Which is a good things since I wasn’t expecting the drawing to be recognizable. And it wasn’t half as frightening as I expected it to be.
I’ll try some more tomorrow.
Single line drawing odds and ends on chair
Single line drawing office chair
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by Henk ter Heide on Monday April 27, 2009
This was meant as part of a larger drawing. But as soon as I started I realized that the size of chair was too large to fit the rest. So I thought I finish it as a kind of study. To get a feel for what I was planning.
Since I have a tendency to loose myself in the details I thought I draw this more abstract. Drawing the colors without giving much attention to the shapes.
That went very well for a while. But then I made a mistake and got so distracted that I couldn’t continue the drawing.
That I get so distracted every time I make a little mistake means that I’ll have to try something I’ve been dreading ever since I started drawing.
I’ll have to try to make a single line ink drawing.
The funny/panicky thing about a single line ink drawing is that you are sure to fail. That is even if you succeed in drawing a reasonable picture of, what ever it is your drawing, you will always find a lot of mistakes. Which means it’s the single most frightening thing to do for somebody that is as focused on details as I am.
But on the other hand.
If I can get through this.
What could hurt me?
Chair filled with odds and ends
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by Henk ter Heide on Friday November 16, 2007
I got a little bored with only drawing my left hand, so I decide it would be fun to try the same technique on the chair I drew a few months ago.
But that turned out to be a little harder then I imagined. In drawing my left hand I started at the left side and worked my way to the right. Which was exactly what I tried with the chair. But for some reason the result was that the pillows got about ten times as big as they really are.
I thru two sketches out before I finally realized what I was doing wrong.
In drawing a hand you don’t have bother with details. All the fingers are about the same size. So it doesn’t matter that much were you start.
But in starting with a detail of the chair I made it very difficult to estimate how much bigger the pillows should be. To make matters worse, the pillows are at an angle. Which means that if you draw the angle even a few degrees off the pillow gets very much larger.
This time I started with the back of the chair. That’s the widest part of the chair. Since every thing else is smaller it’s a lot easier to estimate the size.
Chair
There’s only one thing I wonder about.
I’ve been reading further in the “brain book
” and the author suggests to use a right-angled cut-out to frame the picture you want to draw and a piece of plastic to draw on. That is, draw on the plastic while looking through the plastic. Which means that you’re in fact tracing the chair on to the plastic.
It seems that even a famous painters like Vincent van Gogh used some kind of frame when he was learning to paint.
I use neither.
Does that mean that I’m very good at drawing? Or does that just mean that I’m kind of stupid?
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by Henk ter Heide on Tuesday October 16, 2007
Connecting the trunk to the leafs.
Looking at my tree drawings you might have the feeling that they consist of two separate parts: The trunk and the leafs.
You would be right.
I used to start with a trunk. Then stop to think how I would draw the rest of the tree.
The last few days I started with the top of the tree and then planted a trunk underneath.
But every tree drawing starts out with a lot of blue. I get a brown trunk by mixing blue with orange and green leafs by mixing blue with yellow.
So why couldn’t I draw the whole tree in blue and then mix in the orange and the yellow.
I tried. In combination with the drawing with the side of the pencil this makes for a very strong tree.
(If I may say so myself 
)
Tree 9
With a little more experimenting I found that if I mix purple with yellow I get almost the same color brown as when I mix blue with orange.
That should mean that I could mix branches into the leafs.
Something to try tomorow.
Which goes to show that I had nothing to worry about.
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by Henk ter Heide on Thursday October 11, 2007
Starting a drawing with a sketch.
I was actually thinking of doing this sea sketch in red. It’s much easier to start at something knowing that you’ll probably fail if you set out to fail.
But on second thought the point is doing it as good as I can and taking the risk of failing.
Any way. Last night in the shower I thought of something that is very obvious but for some reason I hadn’t thought about it: I could make a sketch in the colors I’m going to use.
The special part of that is that you usually do a sketch in graphite pencil and then color it in. Often you’ll only decide which colors you’ll use after you’ve made the sketch. The problem with this approach is that the black graphite is always visible and I don’t like that.
With this drawing I have to color round a white open space where the foam is supposed to be. So starting with a sketch isn’t a bad idea.
The difficult bit for me is that this reminds me of the tracing of photographic memories that I haven’t been able to do until now. What I did this time wasn’t really tracing but I’m getting there.
Sea 3
Looking around the internet for guidance I came across a drawing that is much better then anything I can make right now. But it does give me the feeling that I’m on the right track.
Shower of stars3
This drawing is by Shere Chamness
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by Henk ter Heide on Monday August 20, 2007
Heavy weather is drawing near. Luckily it isn’t happening in real live but in my drawings.
Over the coming week I will be showing you a few sketches of clouds. Hopefully they’ll get better.
Clouds 4th sketch
Featured on See me draw
Robh’s paintings and drawings of landscapes are as beautiful is his indoor scenes.
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by Henk ter Heide on Friday June 29, 2007
Yesterdays mistake
Half way through my second attempt of the drawing of the color fountain I realized what I did wrong the first time. I mixed to many colors.
Color fountain 2th sketch
The idea was to make a lot of patches of colors. Then I would use my eraser as a kind of pencil and remove part of the pigment. That would give me the shape of falling water.
By adding a color on top and blending all the colors I would get something that would resemble the picture in my mind.
But that’s what I tried yesterday and it resulted in a drawing with a lot more brown than I liked.
I’ll have to think about this some more. There must be a way to draw this picture.
Inspiration
Actually it was a waste to throw the 2th sketch out. It would have been an even greater waste if I had covered all those colors. It’s a lot of work to create a lot of colored patches and it could look really nice.
Let’s see what happens if I fill the sheet with colored patches and make the colors deeper, more pronounced.
Patched
Link
Julian Beever makes pavement drawings. Large three dimensional pictures that from the right angle look very real. He also does some oil paintings.
(The “best sites” link in the lower left corner will take you to a kind of portal page with a lot of ads. Ironically it’s called “Addfree stats”.)
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by Henk ter Heide on Monday June 18, 2007
I’m again on sick leave. Again.
I was working at Promen‘s branch in Cappelle aan de Ijsel but they run out of work a few weeks ago. Thinking that was temporary I took some holidays but I’ve none left and still there is no work.
Since they run out of options they pressured me to except placement at the “doorstroom afdeling” (the overflow department) in Gouda. Every department in Gouda I’ve ever worked turned out to be very chaotic and I feared that would also be the case with the Overflow department.
Truch 1th sketch
The Overflow department is the department for people for whom Promen hasn’t any work. Nothing at this department is organized. People are just placed in this room, some product is dumped in the room and people are told to fend for them selves.
Nobody knows what is expected of them so they all roam the room looking for something to do. The moment that someone has some idea of what he could do every other person in room jumps in. Resulting in a situation where ten people are doing a job that would go better when it was done by two people.
I was brought there last Wednesday and endured it for about an hour before I fled. The second day was little better and I fled after two hours. The third day I called in sick.
I’m not quit sure what will happen next. According to the agreement I have with Promen they should place me at the department in Cappelle aan de Ijsel but they don’t have work. Promen will probably claim that this are circumstances beyond there control, which isn’t actually the case. It has been known for a few years that the demand for unskilled labor would change when the European Union would open the border eastern Europe. Promen just didn’t act on this change.
I’ll just wait and see. In the mean time I can work on my drawings.
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