A few more drawings

I picked up the sketchbook and drawing textbook again this weekend, so here’s what I managed to draw:

First off, an attempt to draw Peter Capaldi as Doctor Who, based on a still frame from near the beginning of “Robot of Sherwood.” I tried to do this a week earlier with a full-face portrait of Jenna-Louise Coleman as Clara, and gave up in the middle because I couldn’t get her to look anything like right. It’s possible my standards were too high for Jenna. This doesn’t really look like Capaldi, but at least I got myself to finish and it’s recognizably a man:

A few August sketches

Well, one thing I managed to do during August was pull out my “Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain” stuff and do a few profile portrait exercises, including a live sketch of my mom. First, though, was another copying exercise. Here’s the profile picture that I was copying out of the workbook, “Madame X” by John Singer Sargent:

This is the freehand copy that I made of the Sargent portrait:

Sharing some more sketches (and a fanvid!)

It’s been a while since I’ve talked about drawing here on the blog; in fact, it’s been a while since I’ve done much drawing. I gave myself some goals in December and reached them, but I also realized that it was a little depressing to work on drawing in the winter without much natural light. But I do have some sketches that I wanted to share with you before I forgot about them entirely.

 

A September exercise out of the ‘Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain’ workbook; my own knees and feet in perspective. 😉

 

 

 

I think this was my first try at the ‘books on a table’ still life perspective exercise. I probably have another whack at it around somewhere, because I wasn’t that impressed, but I couldn’t find it when I was taking stuff in to get it scanned.

I’m still drawing on perspective

Over the weekend I finally got back to some ‘Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain’ stuff. The next assignment in the chapter on perspective, (after copying somebody else’s,) was to draw an open door by sighting it. I picked the open doorway out of my kitchen, and I think I like how it came out:

For comparison, here’s a (slightly tilted, sorry) photo of the same doorway I took on the iPhone!

In which I try to copy Van Gogh’s perspective…

Hey. It’s been a while since I’ve done anything with drawing, specifically ‘Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain’, but I wanted to at least give it another try now that I’m back from Odyssey, so I pulled out the books last week and tried a drawing exercise Sunday morning. In February I’d gotten up to the chapter on perspective, and there was an example in the workbook where you try to sigh-copy a Van Gogh sketch with perspective in it. So, here’s the original of the Van Gogh:

 

And here’s my version…

 

Whatcha think? It kinda looks okay, especially from a distance.

New Year, New Goals

Happy New Year to you, friends and followers! I haven’t been that wild about the number 13 for a little while. It didn’t really start as a superstitious thing; I just started to dislike it when I began messing around with number theory and factoring; I tend to prefer numbers with lots of factors to primes, and there 13 is, not just a prime, but coming right after 12, the first number to have five different factors other than itself. 😉

But since we’re stuck with 2013 for a whole year, I’ve decided that I need to learn to love it, and part of that is my ‘Lucky 13’ goals list for the year – 13 things I want to accomplish in the year. Here’s the list:

1. Apply for Summer workshops: Odyssey, Clarion West, Clarion, and CSSF Novels.
2. Finish ‘How to Revise your Novel’ lessons.
3. Submit revised “Won’t somebody think of the children” for critters.org RFDR and nanowrimo.org Feedback/Critiques forum.
4. New novel-length revision project – get through Block Revision at least.
5. Finish lessons 1-8 of ‘How to Think Sideways’ (given to me by my sister.)
6. Finish working through ‘Drawing on the Right side of the brain’
7. Read 104 short stories (2 per week)
8. Spend 2 hours cleaning/tidying apartment every week
9. Polish 50 chapters of completed fanfic.
10. Complete 2 fanvideos
11. Write 15 new short stories
12. Do short story shrine revisions on 4 stories
13. Start online dating

And, I’ve come up with a short list of steps I want to take in January – not definitive, as I expect I’ll also be working on things like the cleaning and short stories in every month…

• Finish lesson 20 of ‘How to Revise your Novel’
• Review critters feedback for ‘Gnomes’ and revise sample chapters accordingly.
• Flesh out five-page synopsis for ‘The Gnomes are Missing’
• Cut Block Revision draft of “The Storm Mirror” down to 6500 words.
• Proofread “Time Bubble Trap” and submit to critters.org queue
• Get feedback on ‘The Storm Mirror’
• Earn a critters mpc credit
• Finish updating 12 stories on fanfiction.net

How about you, have you got anything already on your to-do list for 2013?

TGIFBC

This acronym was offered by a friend of mine at work today, and I think it’s very appropriate. Thank Goodness It’s (the) Friday Before Christmas. 🙂

I’ll be able to work a half-day from home on Monday, for Christmas Eve, and then I have Christmas Day up at my sister’s place, Boxing Day, and I don’t need to go back into the office until next Thursday. On the other hand, I’m kind of on-call for work stuff, but I don’t expect that’ll be too bad.

On the creative front, things are going fairly well. I’ve done some Block Revision on ‘The Storm Mirror’ every morning this week except for Monday, (when I left early to take the bus and got some writing done on ‘Time Bubble Trap’,) and I picked up my art stuff with ‘Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain’ today, for the first time since October.

TGIFBC to all of you, especially anybody who doesn’t need to go into work on Christmas Eve! 🙂