February Drawing Month update

Okay, well, as I finished my last post about drawing, I’d just gotten up to the first upside-down drawing exercise I did, where I copied somebody else’s pencil sketch by turning it upside down and uncovering it a bit at a time. The idea of this, according to Betty Edwards, is to confuse your literate and specific left brain by drawing something that it can’t assign a label to, so that your right brain is free to draw what you actually see.

When I started off February drawing month, I started off with several more upside down drawings. First, one that I think really came out well, was of a horsey:

I didn’t mean to have the head and tail go off the edge of the page like that – I’m still having some issues with judging distances, so I ran out of room. Still – nice horsey! The next one was a horse and rider, and I’m not so wild about it:

 

There was a lot of shading in the original, but I wasn’t quite sure how to get a light touch with the shading and not have it overwhelm the solid edges. Possibly the fact that I was using a mechanical pencil didn’t help. Third was a seated woman:

 

You might remember this one from the post about the scanner that didn’t work well. I think there are a few things that didn’t come together as well as I’d like them, but the perspective of her legs and her face were nice!

After doing these exercises, I started a new chapter in Betty’s book ‘Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain’, talking about the development of drawing styles as children grow up. I spotted one line that had the makings of a spot exercise in them, in the section talking about the earliest stage, scribbling in infancy:

“A circular movement is a natural movement–more so, for instance, than the arm movements required to draw a square. Try both on a piece of paper, and you’ll see what I mean.”

 

Forgive the uneven background – I accidentally drew on the back of a Ticketmaster ticket printout instead of a fresh piece of unused paper. 🙂 So I kinda see what Betty means; starting a circle is very natural. It’s keeping the arc constant and having it come out even that’s tough. I didn’t find drawing the square much less natural on any level, though.

So, that’s the first few days of my drawing month. I’ll share some more with you real soon!