Okay, the drawing stuff is still going well, and I hope you’ll enjoy the artistic masterpieces that I can share with you. 😉
When I left off last time, I was in the middle of working through the “Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain” chapter on the development of drawing skill in young children. The section on the landscape drawing stage talks a lot about a typical scene that many children return to draw again and again, and Betty encouraged the reader to remember that picture and draw it again. I’m still not sure if I remember a scene that I actually drew as a child, but after thinking about my childhood and the sort of things that were typically in childhood landscapes, I drew this:
Later in the chapter, Betty talked about the difficulties of moving on to ‘realistic’ drawing and the paradoxes of perspective, with examples about how it’s impossible to draw a recognizable cube with square shapes, because the squares get distorted into other shapes via perspective. (Unless you’re just looking at one face of the cube head on, in which case it’s a square, but you can’t tell that there’s any more to the shape than one square.)
So I wanted to try sketching a cubic die, and several other platonic dice. Luckily I still had a few, though I’ve thrown out most of my collection of RPG dice:
After that, I moved on to a new chapter, full of really interesting and weird drawing assignments. The first one involved tracing the lines on your palm, moving the pencil as you moved your eyes – but you were supposed to keep your head turned away from the paper that you were drawing on, so the results weren’t supposed to be a realistic picture of your palm, just a window into the process. So here’s the ‘drawing’ I made of my palm:
The next exercise wasn’t on ordinary drawing paper that I could scan in – it involved holding a piece of plastic up in front of my hand and tracing over it with a washable marker. So, to share these with you, I took a picture of the markings before I rubbed them off. Once again, I was working with my own hand as the subject of the drawing:
And that takes me nearly up to today. One little detail that I’ll tease until I can get today’s masterpiece scanned in: I went down to Curry’s art store across town and picked up a few new supplies. These included a special drawing pencil, some charcoal sticks, two pastel crayons, and a graphite stick. Guess which one I used first?
The Kelworth Files 