Catching you up on my drawings

Hey! So, thanks to everybody who commented on the drawings I shared for ISWG this week. I’m going to be showing you a lot more drawings over the next few weeks, because I’m doing a special push for drawing time-slices in February – I even added a special letter A to my Calendar of Goal Tracking for Art – to be used whenever I spend some time reading from ‘Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain’ or do at least one drawing exercise. (I gave myself a very little ‘a’ yesterday because I read about an exercise and then decided that I wasn’t ready for it yet.)

But today, I want to catch you up on some of the work I’ve done on the book before February started. First, two more pre-instruction drawing that I didn’t share last time. The first was a face from memory, which is a very hard thing for even a trained artist to do, according to the book. I tried to draw a friend:

I did the first three pre-instruction drawings in October, the night of the Hamilton Nanowrimo kick-off party. In December, I found one more pre-instruction exercise idea in the workbook that hadn’t been mentioned in the book proper – drawing the corner of a room. I chose the corner of my living room near the TV stand – and immortalized a television and VCR that have since been taken to the recycling depot:

The next exercise was a general warm-up involving using different kinds of pencil marks on paper:

The next drawing is getting more into the right brain/left brain stuff. I traced one side of a two faces or a vase optical illusion from the book. The assignment was to complete the other side with freehand drawing, making it match the other side as closely as possible – but to repeat to yourself the parts of the face as you were drawing them – forehead, eyes, nose, mouth, chin, that kind of thing.

As you can see, I didn’t do too well – but Betty admitted in the following pages that it was a trick assignment, because naming the parts of the face was something that was designed to dial the verbal left side of my brain into what I was doing, and the left side of the brain isn’t as good at judging shapes or accurately rendering distances. We were supposed to write down a few notes about how we resolved this conflict. Here’s what I scrawled:

“I’m not quite sure what I did here. I think in trying to keep the vase sort of symmetrical and also keep a hold of the names, I started ‘rushing to get the exercise over with’, I E placing some features too high and de-emphasizing others.”

The last exercise I did in December was one that was designed to engage the right brain, not the left brain – an upside down drawing exercise where you cover most of the reversed original, leaving yourself just a few pieces that you can’t recognize, and try to copy those elements as faithfully as you can with freehand drawing, then move the covering piece of paper so that you can see a little more. This first one was a Picasso sketch of Stravinsky:

Not an ideal copy, but I think I kinda like it.