Late IWSG: procrastination and February blahs

First, sorry that this is late. I’ve actually been having some issues about juggling ‘What’s up Wednesday’ and the IWSG the past few months, since they both fall on Wednesdays. I don’t want to skip either, but I don’t like blogging twice in the same day or trying to combine two topics in the same post, so… what can ya do?

So, yeah. Insecure Writer’s Support Group. I knew what I had to focus on this week, and next week. Time’s running out for applying to Kij Johnson’s novel workshop, I got some great feedback on my synopsis from Team Ambitious, so… I mucked around, watched television, and didn’t really tackle it until this evening.

I’m not quite sure why I couldn’t rise above procrastination. This winter has been a bit tough on me, energy-wise. I can keep on with the day-to-day, and I’m reading like nobody’s business, but actually getting stuff written has been harder. Also, the feedback that my critiquers sent out was rich enough in detail to be a little overwhelming, and this was the first time in months that we weren’t able to swing a Google Hangout for critiques. So I didn’t have the little ceremony of the virtual critique circle to help me come to terms with the response, just a few files in my email. Maybe it took me this long to come to terms subconsciously with what I absorbed when I skimmed through the files, and that’s something I had to do before I could tackle the work consciously. (Looks back and forth shiftily.) Yeah, that’s exactly what happened.

But at least I’m making progress now.

February Drawing month wrap-up, with extra chairs.

Okay, it’s been a while since I did a drawing post, which is good, because it means I’ve got a lotta pictures to show you. All of these were ‘negative space drawings’ – a technique where you focus on the empty space around the object that’s actually there – because the logical left side of your brain is bored by empty space and doesn’t know what mental category to bucket it into, so it bugs out and lets the right side draw what it sees – or so the theory goes.

After a little back and forth, I started with an exercise where you draw a chair based on a photograph. The workbook suggested cutting one out of a magazine or newspaper – I used Google Image Search and decided to work with this:

And here’s my negative space version. I toned most of the page with a graphite stick before I started drawing and erased everything but the ‘negative space’ when I was done.

 

February is Drawing to a close…

But I’ve still got nearly a week to draw my heart out! 😉

Earlier in the week, I was continuing with observational sketches using the plastic picture plane. I showed you a photograph last time of the picture plane with my hand holding a flash drive. Here’s the final sketch result. My fingers didn’t come out perfect, but I think I’m showing some progress:

Next, I did a still life of an apple with the picture plane, and I went back to toning my drawing paper with the charcoal stick:

February drawing – week 3 update

Are you sick and tired of seeing my pictures and hearing me ramble on about the right side of the brain yet? I hope not, ’cause here comes some more. 😀

Well, since Saturday, I’ve done quite a bit with some very complicated Contour Drawing exercises. The overall recipe goes something like this:

• Draw a horizontal and vertical axis onto the paper to match the plastic picture plane.
• Take the graphite stick that I bought at Curry’s art store and rub it over the paper to ‘tone’ it to a shade of dark silver or light gray. Use a paper towel to rub away any extra graphite.
• Use the plastic picture plane to get an outline of the subject I want to draw, in temporary marker, keeping only one eye open to avoid stereoscopic confusion.
• Put the plastic picture plane against a white paper background to see the lines clearly, and copy the marks onto the paper in pencil as well as I can.
• Then return to the original subject, from as close to the original perspective as possible, and refine or add detail to the pencil drawing as much as possible. Use the one-eye technique again.

It’s been very interesting. For the first go-round, I did another marker outline of my hand:

 

And from that, I made the toned drawing like this:

 

Mid-February Drawing Update

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:

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: